Site migrations without the traffic cliff.
Redesigns, replatforms, domain changes, and site mergers all carry the same risk: years of search equity, lost in an afternoon. We map, redirect, test, and monitor - the part of the project that too often nobody invoiced for.
Here's how sites lose half their organic traffic: the new site goes live on a Friday, the old URLs die, and nobody mapped where they should go. The dev team shipped what was scoped. Redirects weren't in the scope.
We do this work all the time, and it's a bigger job than anyone budgets for - which is exactly why it gets skipped, and exactly why it's a service rather than a footnote.
What a migration done properly involves
- Full URL inventory: every page, file, and parameter variant that exists today, from the CMS, the crawl, analytics, and Search Console. The pages you forgot about still have links and rankings.
- Content mapping: deciding where each page's subject and equity lives on the new site. Not everything gets a twin; the mapping decides what consolidates, what redirects, and what's allowed to die deliberately.
- 301 redirect map: one-to-one wherever possible, built before launch and version-controlled. Blanket homepage redirects are how equity evaporates.
- Domain changes handled properly: Search Console change-of-address, canonical hygiene, and the sequencing that stops old and new competing with each other.
- Pre-launch testing: the map run against staging before anyone presses the button, not discovered in production.
- Post-launch monitoring: crawl errors, redirect chains, rankings, and traffic watched through the settling period, with fixes shipped as things surface.
Done properly, a migration is a non-event: traffic carries on, and often grows on the back of the new site. Done wrong, it's carnage - people arriving from search and social hitting 404s, traffic and trust lost together. And it almost always costs more to fix after launch than the mapping would have cost before it.
Questions we get asked
Our developers say they'll handle the redirects. Isn't that enough?
Sometimes. But we've cleaned up after a lot of launches where it wasn't. Devs are paid to ship the new site, and redirect mapping is often nobody's line item - it wasn't scoped, it wasn't invoiced, so it didn't happen. Or a blanket redirect sends every old URL to the homepage, which Google treats as a soft 404. The work isn't hard; it just has to actually be someone's job.
When should we involve you?
Before the URL structure is final - that's when moving things is free. We can rescue a migration after launch, but you'll spend some traffic while we do. The cheapest version of this service is the one booked early.
How long does the risk period last?
Expect turbulence for a few weeks as Google recrawls, with the picture settling over one to three months depending on site size. We monitor rankings, crawl errors, and traffic through that window and fix what surfaces - launch day is the midpoint of a migration, not the end.
Do you handle site mergers, not just replatforms?
Yes - mergers are the harder version, and we've done them at company scale. When TASK Group brought multiple company sites into one, search visibility stayed strong through the process. That's mapping content and equity from several domains into one structure without cannibalising anything.
Related reading
Want this handled properly?
Tell us where you're at. We'll tell you what we'd do - and what it costs.