Website Migration SEO
Website Migration SEO Services
Replatform, rebrand, or change hosts without giving back years of earned rankings.
A migration is the highest-risk event in the life of an organic channel, and most post-launch traffic losses are preventable. My website migration SEO services make cutover a controlled, measured event: complete redirect mapping, pre- and post-migration crawl QA, index protection, and a rollback plan agreed before anyone touches DNS.
Migrations lose traffic for predictable reasons
When organic traffic collapses after a replatform or domain move, the causes are rarely mysterious. Redirect gaps orphan pages that held rankings and backlinks. New templates quietly drop the internal links, headings, or content blocks that made pages competitive. Staging directives follow the site into production. Faceted navigation on the new platform opens crawl traps the old one never had. None of this is exotic, but all of it is invisible until you know exactly what the site looked like before the move and can verify, URL by URL, what it looks like after.
That verification discipline is the core of how I work. I have run migration SEO hands-on at enterprise and mid-market scale: a Sitecore to Shopify replatform for a nationwide marine dealership that required a 10,553-row redirect map, a BigCommerce URL architecture rebuild governed by more than 5,000 redirect rules, WooCommerce host moves executed under live traffic, and reindexing recovery for sites that had been hacked and dropped from Google. Different platforms and different stakes, same principle: account for every URL before cutover, and verify every URL after it.
What website migration SEO services should cover
Every engagement is organized around four risk controls:
- A complete redirect map built from crawl data, analytics, backlinks, and index coverage, so every URL that ever earned traffic or links resolves in a single hop.
- Pre- and post-migration crawl QA that captures a full baseline of the old site and checks the new one against it: titles, canonicals, structured data, internal linking, and rendering.
- Index protection that keeps staging environments out of search engines and gets the new site crawled and understood quickly after launch.
- A rollback plan with thresholds and decision criteria agreed before cutover, so if launch metrics deteriorate the response is a plan rather than a debate.
One thing has changed in the last few years: a migration now puts AI visibility at stake too. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI experiences cite pages from the same index your migration puts at risk. Protect the index and you protect both channels at once.
Redirect mapping at full scale
Complete, single-hop redirect maps built from crawls, analytics, backlink data, and index coverage, then validated both before and after cutover.
Pre- and post-migration crawl QA
A full baseline crawl of the old site and parity checks on the new one: titles, canonicals, internal links, structured data, and rendering.
Replatforming expertise
Hands-on experience moving sites across Sitecore, Shopify, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce, including URL structures the new platform fights you on.
Index protection
Staging lockdown, canonical and noindex audits, XML sitemap strategy, and Search Console monitoring through the volatile weeks after launch.
Rollback and contingency planning
Thresholds and decision criteria agreed before cutover, so a bad launch becomes a controlled event instead of a crisis.
Recovery migrations
Diagnosis and repair for migrations that already went wrong, plus reindexing work for sites damaged by hacks or botched launches.
When to bring in an SEO migration consultant
The ideal time is before your development team commits to a URL structure, because that is when SEO requirements are cheap to honor. The realistic answer is: as early as you can. I have joined projects months before launch and days before launch. Earlier engagement means redirect logic and template requirements get built into the project instead of bolted on afterward, but even a late-stage crawl audit routinely catches problems that would have cost real revenue.
I work with your developers or implementation partner rather than around them. They get redirect specifications in the exact format their platform expects, QA gates tied to the launch plan, and clear sign-off criteria. If you are weighing an independent consultant against a site migration SEO agency, the practical difference is accountability: with me, the person who scoped the risk is the same person validating every URL at cutover. No handoffs, no account layer, no junior staff learning on your launch.
CASE STUDIES
Results from real engagements
10,553redirect map rows covering every legacy URLMarineMax: Migrating a Nationwide Boat Dealer from Sitecore to ShopifyMarineMax, a nationwide boat dealer with more than 60 locations, needed its enterprise Sitecore site replatformed to Shopify without losing years of…Read the case study
5,223redirect rules added in three weeksOliveNation: Taming 630,000 Junk URLs on BigCommerce EnterpriseOliveNation, a wholesale supplier of baking, brewing, and restaurant ingredients, came to me with Google reporting roughly 630,000 crawled but unindexed URLs…Read the case study+34%Non-branded organic clicks in 30 daysWater Feature Pros: +34% Non-Branded Clicks After Fixing a Broken MigrationWater Feature Pros, a veteran-owned nationwide WooCommerce retailer of outdoor fountains and water features, came to me in February 2026 after a…Read the case studyFrequently asked questions
How early should we bring you into a migration project?
As soon as replatforming is a decision rather than an idea. URL structure, template design, and redirect handling are far cheaper to get right during development than to repair after launch. That said, I regularly join projects late in the timeline, and a focused pre-launch audit still removes most of the catastrophic risk.
Can you work with our in-house developers or existing agency?
Yes, and that is how most engagements run. I supply redirect rules in the format your platform and server stack expect, define QA gates for the launch plan, and validate the work independently. Your team keeps building; I make sure search equity survives the build.
Is some traffic loss inevitable during a migration?
Short-term volatility while search engines recrawl and consolidate signals is normal. A sustained decline is not. When redirects are complete, content and internal-linking parity holds, and indexation is managed, rankings consolidate on the new URLs rather than reset. The job is to make any dip shallow and brief, and to know within days rather than months if something is off.
What do website migration SEO services cost?
It depends on URL count, platform pair, and timeline. A straightforward host move is a fraction of what an enterprise replatform requires. After a free consultation I quote a fixed scope, so you know the full cost before committing. The honest way to evaluate that quote is against what a post-launch traffic decline would cost you in revenue for every month it persists.
We already migrated and traffic dropped. Is it recoverable?
Usually, and speed matters. I reconstruct the pre-migration state, compare it against the live site, close redirect gaps, restore content and internal-linking parity, and fix the crawl and indexation problems the launch introduced. The longer those gaps persist, the more equity transfers permanently to competitors, so this is the one scenario where I recommend moving immediately.
Which platforms and migration types do you handle?
Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Sitecore and other enterprise CMS platforms, plus domain consolidations, rebrands, HTTPS and host moves, and hack-recovery reindexing. The methodology is platform agnostic. The execution details are not, which is exactly why platform experience matters.