A redesign or replatform is the single most common way a business destroys years of search visibility overnight. It is also entirely avoidable, provided the mapping happens before launch rather than after the traffic drops.
Every existing URL mapped to its new destination, including the ones nobody remembered.
301s tested on staging, with chains and loops eliminated before they reach production.
Current rankings, traffic and indexed pages recorded so any drop can be diagnosed, not guessed at.
Making sure the new pages keep the content that was earning the rankings.
Canonicals, schema, sitemaps and robots rules rebuilt on the new platform.
Search Console watched daily for the first fortnight, when problems are still cheap to fix.
Everything measured while the old site is still live, because you cannot recover what you never recorded.
Old to new mapping built and tested on staging, not written on launch day.
Redirects deployed, sitemaps submitted, indexing requested for priority pages.
Daily monitoring for two weeks, then weekly, until the numbers settle back.
Almost always redirects. The new site changed URLs and the old ones were not mapped across, so every page that had rankings now returns a 404 or lands on the homepage. The second most common cause is content that was quietly dropped because it did not fit the new design, including the pages that were earning the traffic.
Every old URL needs a 301 to its closest new equivalent. Redirecting everything to the homepage is not a fix, and Google treats it as a soft 404.
Designers remove pages that look untidy. Those are often the pages ranking for long tail terms.
A staging copy that Google can crawl creates a duplicate of your entire site.
Rankings do not drop the day you launch. They fade as Google recrawls, which is why the cause is often missed.
A website migration SEO service maps every existing URL to its new destination before launch, tests the redirects on staging, records a baseline of current rankings and traffic, and then monitors Search Console daily for the first fortnight. Most SEO migration companies do the mapping after launch, which is when the damage has already happened.
A consultant hands your developer the mapping and the rules. An agency implements it. Both work, and the cheaper option depends on who you already have.
Canonicals, schema, sitemaps and robots rules all have to be rebuilt on the new platform, not just the URLs.
Moving from WooCommerce to Shopify or the reverse changes the URL structure whether you want it to or not.
Before the new site is built, not after. Once the URLs are decided, half the options are gone.
No invented testimonials anywhere on this site. Where results were not verified, we say so on the page.
Two months of local SEO for an Australian local business, measured year on year.
Read the case study →Crawl errors cleared from 58,614 to 36 in a full technical rebuild.
Read the case study →Position 2 for a commercial term at 3,700 searches a month.
Read the case study →