Service 03 of 04
Change platforms without losing your search traffic
Migrations lose traffic for the same few reasons: URLs change without redirects, content gets trimmed, tracking breaks on launch day, and nobody watches the weeks after. I plan the move URL by URL and stay on it until the numbers settle.
Scope
Before launch
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A crawl and inventory of every URL
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A baseline of rankings and traffic for the pages that earn it
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A redirect map: one hop per URL, no chains
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A content check, so pages that rank keep what made them rank
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A tracking plan, so analytics and forms work on day one
Planning to day 90
- Before launch
I crawl and list every URL, baseline the pages that earn traffic, map each redirect to one hop, and check content and tracking on staging.
- Launch day
Redirects at the edge, staged checks before DNS moves, and Search Console updated the same day.
- Weeks 1 to 3
Daily monitoring, and fixes as problems show up.
- Days 30 and 90
A readout.
Most of my migrations are WordPress to Astro
Also domain moves, Shopify themes and Next.js.
Questions
Before you book
How far before launch should we bring you in?
Typically 4 to 8 weeks, depending on the size of the site. The redirect map and the baseline take the longest, and both are easier before the new URLs are final.
What happens if traffic drops after launch?
Some movement in the first two weeks is normal while Google recrawls. I check the pages that earned traffic every day for three weeks. A drop that holds gets traced to a redirect, a missing page element or a tracking gap, and fixed that week.
Book 30 minutes and tell me what your site should be doing that it isn’t.
30 minutes, no deck.