SEO website migration services: redesign or replatform without losing your rankings

A migration, in SEO terms, is any change that alters the URLs, content, platform or domain search engines already know. A visual refresh that keeps every URL and every word is low risk. Most real projects are not like that: the redesign merges service pages, the new CMS uses a different URL pattern, the blog moves from a subdomain to a folder, or the business rebrands to a new domain. Each of those changes needs website migration SEO planning, done before the build is finished, not the week after launch.

These services suit businesses with meaningful organic traffic that are about to redesign, companies replatforming from WordPress to a custom build (or the reverse), sites moving from an old PHP framework to Laravel, and agencies that want a technical person to own the SEO side of a client launch. If your site is new and gets almost no search traffic, a short website launch SEO checklist is enough.

Yes, and it can go either way. Google ranks URLs, and each one carries its own history: links pointing at it, the queries it ranks for, how it has performed. When a URL disappears without a redirect, that history is cut off and the page starts from zero, or the visitor lands on a 404. When content is cut or merged carelessly, the new page may stop matching the searches the old one won. Done well, a migration often leaves the site faster and better structured than before, and that can help rankings.

Some fluctuation for a few weeks after a large change is normal while Google recrawls and reprocesses the site. A sustained drop almost always traces back to a short list of causes I check for on every project.

• Old URLs returning 404 because the redirect map missed them, often PDFs, images, tag archives or paginated pages
• Everything redirected to the home page, which Google treats like a soft 404
• A noindex tag or a Disallow: / rule copied from staging to the live site
• Canonical tags still pointing at the staging domain or at the old URLs
• Redirect chains several hops long left from previous migrations
• Valuable copy cut during the redesign because it looked untidy in the new layout
• Content that now only appears after JavaScript runs, with internal links built as buttons instead of real anchor tags

To redesign a website without losing SEO, the work starts before any design is signed off. I build the URL inventory from several sources, because a crawl alone misses orphaned pages that still rank or attract links. I combine a Screaming Frog crawl, the Pages report in Search Console with its clicks and impressions, landing pages from Google Analytics, every URL in your XML sitemaps and the most linked pages from backlink data. Then each URL gets a decision: keep, merge, redirect or deliberately retire.

The 301 redirect mapping is a reviewed spreadsheet, not a regex written at midnight. Each old URL goes to the closest equivalent page, one hop, with parameters and trailing slashes handled consistently. On Nginx I usually load the map from a file; on Laravel I sometimes keep redirects in a database table with an admin screen so marketing can add new ones later without a deploy. Google recommends keeping redirects in place for at least a year, and I recommend keeping them indefinitely for URLs with backlinks.

I also update internal links to point at the new URLs directly instead of relying on redirects, regenerate the XML sitemap, and carry over titles, descriptions, headings and structured data. Use the website redesign SEO checklist to see the full list of what gets checked.

Domain migration SEO adds a few specific steps: both domains verified in Search Console, a page-level 301 from every old URL to the matching new one, the Change of Address tool submitted from the old property, and the old domain kept registered and redirecting for years. Rebrands usually also need updated Business Profile, social and directory links.

CMS migration SEO is where my developer background matters most. Moving from WordPress to a custom Laravel build, or from an aging framework to a modern one, changes how URLs, pagination, categories and media paths are generated. If you are replatforming, I can do the build itself: CodeIgniter to Laravel migration for older PHP applications, or a Laravel upgrade when the framework version changes and routes or middleware move with it. The SEO requirements go into the build plan from day one, so nothing depends on a hand-off.

Most migration disasters are hand-off failures, which is why my SEO website migration services cover the build side too. The SEO writes a redirect map, the developer implements part of it, staging settings reach production, and nobody checks the live site from a crawler's point of view until traffic falls. With me there is no hand-off: the engineer who writes the redirects is the one who crawls the old URL list against production on launch day. You work directly with me, not an account manager, and I work remotely with clients in different time zones, agreeing update times at the start.

If you already have a developer or agency doing the build, I can work alongside them: write the redirect map and requirements, review the staging site, and run the launch and post-launch checks.

The main drivers are the number of URLs and templates, how much the URL structure and content change, whether it is a domain move, a platform change or both, how many languages or regions the site serves, and whether I am also doing the build. A 40-page business site redesign and a 20,000-URL store replatform are very different projects. A typical migration runs from planning through about a month of post-launch monitoring. After a short call or written brief I send a fixed quote with that timeline.