SEO-Led Website & Platform Migration

Nothing can be protected that has not been listed. We first record the current state: a full crawl, index coverage and query data from Search Console, organic landing pages and their conversions from analytics, and rankings for commercially important queries. This benchmark is the baseline for every later check.

The URL inventory merges every source, because none is complete alone. A crawl finds linked pages; XML sitemaps list orphaned ones; Search Console shows URLs Google still shows; analytics shows URLs that receive visits; backlink data shows old addresses other sites still point to. Deduplicated and scored by traffic, links and conversions, the list decides which URLs need a precise destination and which can be retired on purpose.

Every inventoried URL gets a decision: keep, redirect to an equivalent, or retire. Redirects are permanent 301s, mapped one-to-one to the closest matching page, reaching the final address in a single hop. Redirects from earlier projects are folded into the new map so chains do not form.

Retired pages with no equivalent return 404 or 410 rather than being pushed to the homepage. Parameter URLs, pagination, filtered categories and media files get pattern rules. The map is a spreadsheet the developer can import, with a test column we fill in on staging and again after launch.

A redirect only passes signals if the destination answers the same question. The parity specification covers each template: titles and descriptions, headings, body content and its place in the rendered HTML, images and alt text, internal links, breadcrumbs, canonicals, structured data and, on multilingual sites, hreflang with matching return tags.

Where the new design changes content on purpose, we record what changed and why, so a later drop can be traced to a decision rather than an accident. The benchmark shows which templates carry your organic landings; those are checked first.

Staging is protected with authentication, not only a noindex tag, so it cannot be indexed while authorised crawlers can still test it. We crawl it with rendering enabled, run the redirect map against it and compare templates with the parity specification. Each defect becomes a ticket with the URL, expected and observed result.

Every go/no-go item has an owner and a pass condition: redirects tested, noindex and authentication ready to remove, production robots.txt and sitemaps prepared, analytics firing, structured data valid. If a blocking item fails, we recommend moving the date: launching on time with broken redirects usually costs more than a short delay.

On launch we verify, in order: robots.txt allows crawling and carries no staging rules; staging noindex tags are gone; redirects resolve in one hop, first on high-value URLs and then in full; canonicals point to new addresses; XML sitemaps list only final URLs and are submitted in Search Console. For a domain change, both properties are verified and the Change of Address tool is used as Google Search Central's site move guidance describes. Each check is logged with time and result, so the developer gets a precise fix list.

Some volatility is normal while search engines recrawl and reprocess the site. A monitoring window, agreed before launch and scaled to the site, separates expected movement from real defects. We watch crawl errors, redirect behaviour in server logs where available, index coverage of new and old URLs, Search Console clicks and impressions by template, and organic conversions.

Rollback criteria and the person who makes the call are written down in advance. Rollback is reserved for defects that cannot be fixed forward quickly, such as a broken checkout, an uncrawlable site or a redirect layer failing at scale. Gradual ranking movement is a reason to recheck parity and internal links, not to roll back.

A migration that changes measurement makes its own results unreadable. Before launch we inventory GA4 events, key events and Google Tag Manager containers and specify how they carry over: same names, triggers and parameters, with any necessary change written down. Google Ads and Meta conversion connections are listed so none is dropped.

The consent banner and Consent Mode v2 signals must behave the same on the new site, under KVKK and, where relevant, GDPR; if consent rates move, organic conversion figures move with them. We annotate the launch date and compare like for like, so a search effect can be told from a measurement effect.