Website migration without losing rankings
The traffic drop after a relaunch isn't bad luck. It's a redirect map nobody made, and by the time it shows up in the reporting the agency has already invoiced.
Every old URL gets a destination
Before anything launches, every indexed URL on the current site is inventoried: from the crawl, from Search Console, from analytics, and from the backlink profile, because the pages other sites link to are rarely the pages you remember building. Each one is mapped to its closest equivalent on the new site with a 301. Anything that genuinely has no equivalent gets a decision rather than a 404 by default.
Launch day and the four weeks after
A migration isn't finished when the site goes live; that's when it starts being measurable. We monitor indexation, crawl errors, redirect chains and position changes daily for the first fortnight and weekly after that. Problems surface in days this way, while they're still cheap, rather than in the quarterly report when the damage has compounded.
Common questions
How much traffic will I lose?
A well-run migration dips for two to four weeks and recovers. Expect some fluctuation while Google reprocesses; that's normal. What isn't normal is a permanent drop, and that's almost always redirects.
Can you rescue a migration that already went wrong?
Usually, and the sooner the better. Rebuilding a redirect map after launch is harder because the old URLs are no longer crawlable, but Search Console and archived crawls recover most of it.
Keep reading
- Technical SEO auditMost sites don't rank because of something they're missing. They don't rank because of something they're doing, and nobody has looked closely enough to find it.
- Web design and developmentA website isn't a brochure. It's the salesperson that works while you sleep, and most of the ones we audit are built as though nobody would ever open them on a phone.
- Core Web Vitals and site speedA green lab score on your laptop means very little. What counts is the measurement Google takes from real visitors on real connections, and that number is usually much worse.
- Search engine optimisationRanking first on Google isn't luck and it isn't a bigger budget. It's architecture, content and patience, applied in the language each customer is actually searching in.