SEO
SEO migration services
An SEO migration carries rankings, traffic, and AI visibility through a redesign, platform change, or domain move. The work is an inventory of every URL, one-to-one redirects, preservation of the content that ranks, and weeks of monitoring afterward. Most redesign losses come from skipping that mapping, not from the new design.
From $3,500. Full pricing
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Why do rankings drop after a website redesign?
Almost always because URLs changed without redirects, ranking pages were rewritten or deleted, or the new build renders client-side. The design itself is rarely the cause. Most losses trace to a mapping step that was skipped because nobody scoped it into the rebuild.
There is a newer failure mode as well. A redesign that moves rendering into the browser can hold its Google rankings — Google executes JavaScript — while silently disappearing from AI assistants, whose crawlers have never been observed executing any. Nothing in a normal analytics review surfaces this, because the Google traffic looks fine.
Related: Technical SEO and AI crawler access
What does an SEO migration actually involve?
An SEO migration involves an inventory of every URL and what it earns, a redirect map for everything that changes, preservation of the content that ranks, a render check on the new build, and several weeks of monitoring after launch. Migration is checklist discipline, and the checklist is not optional.
- Full URL inventory with rankings, traffic, and inbound links recorded per page before anything changes.
- One-to-one 301 redirects for every moved URL — never a blanket redirect to the homepage.
- Content preservation: pages that rank keep the substance that ranks them, whatever the new design does around it.
- Render check on the new build: server-side rendered, crawlable, and no firewall rule blocking AI crawlers.
- Schema and entity continuity, so the business's identity survives the move intact.
- Post-launch monitoring in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools until the picture stabilises.
Is it worth changing domains or platforms?
Only when the reason outweighs the risk, and the risk is ordered: a redesign on the same domain is manageable, a platform change adds rendering risk, and a domain change restarts trust signals that took years to accumulate. Consolidating several thin sites into one strong one is often the exception that pays.
| Migration type | Risk | The usual mistake |
|---|---|---|
| Redesign, same domain | Low to moderate | No URL inventory taken before the old site is torn down |
| Platform change | Moderate | New platform renders client-side; AI crawlers lose the site |
| Domain change | Highest | Underestimating how long signals take to transfer |
| Consolidating several sites | Moderate | Redirecting everything to the homepage instead of page-to-page |
Common questions
- How long does traffic take to recover after a migration?
- Some movement for several weeks is normal even when everything was done right, which is why monitoring is part of the work rather than an extra. If the mapping was thorough, traffic returns to baseline; sustained loss beyond that usually points to missed redirects or ranking content that was changed, both findable and fixable while monitoring is running.
- Can you guarantee no ranking loss?
- No, and anyone who does is guessing on your behalf — search systems are not that predictable. What is committed is specific and checkable: the full URL inventory before work starts, one-to-one redirects, content preservation on the pages that rank, a render and crawler check on the new build, and monitoring with fixes until things stabilise.
- Is migration work included when you rebuild my website?
- Yes. Every redesign here is treated as a migration by default, which is not universal practice — the mapping and redirect work is scoped into the build rather than sold as an add-on or skipped silently. Website builds start at $3,500, and the migration checklist runs on every one that replaces an existing site.
Related: Website redesign services
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