Site Migrations
Pre, during, and post-migration support. Redirect mapping, risk mitigation, and traffic preservation through platform changes, redesigns, and domain moves. Most migrations lose 10-30% of traffic. A well-run one loses 0-5%.
Why migrations go wrong
Almost every migration disaster I've seen comes from the same place: SEO got involved a week before launch. By then the URL structure is fixed, the IA is signed off, and the only lever left is "let's hope the redirects work."
The work that actually matters happens months earlier. Mapping URLs while there's still time to negotiate. Talking the new design team out of dropping useful pages. Setting up a baseline so you can prove what was lost and recover it later. By launch day the SEO part should be boring.
What I work on
Before, during, and after launch
Pre-migration baseline
Full crawl, GSC export, ranking snapshot, top pages by traffic and conversions. So we know what we had, and so any post-launch loss can actually be diagnosed instead of argued about.
URL mapping
1-to-1 where possible. Decisions on what to consolidate, what to kill, what to keep with a different URL. Done before the new IA is locked, not after.
Redirect rules
Clean, no chains, all 301. Tested in staging against the full URL set. Edge cases (trailing slashes, parameters, language paths) explicitly handled rather than left to whoever wrote the rewrite rule.
On-day support
Live monitoring of crawl, response codes, and Search Console as the cutover happens. Issues caught and triaged in real time, not in next week's status meeting.
Post-launch recovery
Fix what broke, find the rankings that didn't transfer, repair internal linking, and resubmit sitemaps. Most migration recovery is the boring grind of comparing pre and post data on a per-URL basis.
Stakeholder reporting
Clear traffic-loss attribution and a recovery timeline that's grounded in data. So when leadership asks "why is traffic down 12%?" you have a real answer, not vibes.
When to call me
Platform migration (WordPress to Webflow, custom to Shopify, etc), domain change, major IA restructure, post-merger consolidation, HTTPS or protocol changes. Anything that touches more than a handful of URLs.
When you don't need me: a few URL changes that you can redirect yourself. A small site rebrand without URL changes. Any migration where you're confident the URL structure isn't moving.
Common questions
When should I bring you in?
As early as possible. Ideally before the new IA is finalised. The latest I can be useful is about 4 weeks before launch. Anything tighter than that and we're firefighting.
How long does recovery take?
If the migration was clean, 2-4 weeks back to baseline. If it wasn't, 2-3 months. Some rankings never fully come back if you've changed too many URLs at once or lost too much internal linking equity.
Can you fix a migration that already went badly?
Yes, and this is half the migration work I do. Same process, just compressed: baseline what you had against archives, find the worst losses, fix the redirects and structure, recover what's recoverable.
Do you implement, or just plan?
Plan, spec, and review. Implementation sits with your dev team. I'm in the room (or in Slack) for the technical decisions and the launch.
Got a migration coming up?
Tell me what's moving (platform, domain, IA), the timeline, and the size of the site. I'll let you know what's realistic and what it would take to do this without losing traffic.