Migration Engineering
Site Migration & Replatforming
Site migration done by someone who has cleaned up the aftermath of bad migrations more times than they care to count. Replatform, rebuild, or merge without losing rankings, indexation, or revenue at cutover.
What's Included
Comprehensive solutions tailored to your specific needs
URL inventory & reconciliation
Sitemap, GSC, crawl, log files, and backlink data reconciled into a single prioritised URL inventory.
Redirect engineering
301-only redirect map, server or edge implementation, no chains, no JavaScript redirects, validated pre-launch.
Staging environment QA
Full SEO crawl of staging before cutover: titles, meta, canonicals, schema, hreflang, robots, internal links.
GSC migration & change of address
Property setup, Change of Address request, sitemap submission, and Bing Webmaster Tools mirroring.
Cutover plan & runbook
Documented cutover sequence, rollback plan, and DNS strategy with low-TTL window for safe reversal.
30-day post-launch monitoring
Daily checks against GSC, log files, rankings, and CWV with same-day incident response on regressions.
Problems I Solve
Symptoms this engagement is built to fix
A migration scheduled for next month with no redirect map and no SEO sign-off plan.
A previous migration that lost 40 percent of organic traffic and has not recovered six months in.
Multiple domains being consolidated with no clean canonical or 301 strategy.
A WordPress-to-Shopify or Shopify-to-WooCommerce replatform with thousands of URLs at risk.
An HTTPS migration that never finished — mixed content, broken redirects, GSC still on HTTP.
A subdomain to subdirectory move that leadership wants done quickly and properly.
Why site migrations destroy more SEO value than algorithm updates
Most catastrophic organic-traffic losses I am called in to investigate are not Google algorithm updates. They are migrations that went live without proper redirect planning, without staging-side QA, and without an SEO sign-off gate. A migration touches every URL on the site at once. Get the redirect map wrong, lose every backlink and every ranking attached to those URLs in a single deploy. Most agencies treat migration as a development project; senior practice treats it as a high-risk SEO project that happens to involve development. The difference shows up in the first 30 days post-launch — either organic continues smoothly, or it collapses and stakeholders spend the next six months arguing about whether to roll back.
The migration checklist that actually matters
Most migration checklists you find online are 200 items long and miss the few that actually decide success. The list that matters: a complete URL inventory of the old site (sitemap + GSC + crawl + log files reconciled), a one-to-one redirect map for every URL that has organic traffic, backlinks, or internal links pointing to it, a staging environment that mirrors production behaviour, a pre-launch crawl of staging to verify on-page SEO survives the rebuild, a 301-only redirect strategy (no chains, no 302s, no JavaScript redirects), preservation of structured data, hreflang, and canonical signals, GSC configuration for the new property with a Change of Address request where applicable, a real-time monitoring dashboard for the first 30 days, and a documented rollback plan. Everything else is secondary.
Platform-specific migration pitfalls I see most often
WordPress to Shopify: lose every plugin-emitted schema, lose URL structure (Shopify forces /collections/x/products/y), lose any URL parameter handling. Plan accordingly. Shopify to WordPress (WooCommerce): preserve product URLs via custom rewrites, migrate customer accounts with password reset rather than copy, redirect Shopify's checkout URLs, and rebuild the abandoned-cart flow because Shopify's is not portable. Magento to Shopify: handle the variant proliferation Magento allows and Shopify does not, decide upfront how configurable products map to Shopify's product/variant model. HTTP to HTTPS: rewrite all internal links and assets (a HTTP to HTTPS redirect is not enough — every reference in the rendered HTML must be HTTPS or you get mixed content), update GSC, update sitemaps, update any third-party citations you can reach. Custom to Next.js or any framework rebuild: rebuild every meta and schema element at the template layer rather than relying on the rebuild to inherit it.
Redirect engineering: the single biggest determinant of migration success
A redirect map is not a spreadsheet of old-URL to new-URL. It is a complete inventory, prioritised, with multiple sources reconciled. Source 1: the old site's XML sitemap (covers what was supposed to be indexed). Source 2: GSC URL coverage report (covers what was actually indexed). Source 3: GSC performance report filtered to the last 16 months (covers what had real traffic). Source 4: a recent crawl of the old site (covers internal link structure). Source 5: log files (covers what Googlebot actually visits). Source 6: backlink data from Ahrefs or Majestic (covers what external sites point at). Reconcile all six, prioritise URLs by traffic, backlinks, and conversion value, then build the redirect map with a clear plan for the long-tail URLs that fall below the cut. Implementation is 301-only, at the web server level (Nginx or Apache) or at the edge (Cloudflare Workers) — never via JavaScript or client-side rendering.
The 30 days after launch are the migration
Most migration projects end at cutover. They should not. The 30 days after launch are when problems surface: redirect chains that nobody tested, schema that regressed, hreflang that broke, soft 404s that started appearing, Googlebot crawl errors spiking, and traffic per template drifting. My engagements include a 30-day monitoring window with daily checks against GSC, log files, and rankings for the priority keyword set, with a written incident log and same-day response on regressions. This is the difference between a migration you celebrate and one you spend six months recovering from. Without the monitoring window, you find out about problems six weeks later when the next traffic report lands.
What You Receive
Deliverables & expected outcomes
- Prioritised URL inventory and 1:1 redirect map
- Staging-side SEO QA report
- Server or edge redirect implementation
- GSC migration and Change of Address
- Cutover runbook with rollback plan
- 30-day post-launch monitoring and incident response
Illustrative Engagement
A representative scenario
The problem
An e-commerce site planned a Magento-to-Shopify migration in six weeks. The previous redesign on Magento had lost 35 percent of organic traffic at launch and never recovered; leadership was nervous.
The approach
We built the URL inventory from six reconciled sources, mapped 18,400 URLs to Shopify equivalents (with deliberate consolidation for the 30 percent that were duplicates), implemented 301s at Cloudflare to avoid edge cases in Shopify's redirect handling, and ran a full staging crawl 10 days before cutover.
The outcome
Cutover lost 4 percent of organic traffic in week one and recovered it by week three. Within eight weeks, organic was 11 percent above pre-migration baseline — a result largely attributable to the consolidation work done as part of the migration.
Composite scenario based on typical engagements. Replace with a real, attributed case study once published.
My Process
A proven methodology for delivering exceptional results
Plan & inventory
Reconcile all URL sources, build the prioritised redirect map, agree the cutover date and rollback criteria.
Staging build & QA
Pre-launch crawl, schema validation, hreflang check, internal link audit, and SEO sign-off gate.
Cutover
Sequenced deploy with maintenance window, redirect activation, sitemap submission, GSC Change of Address, and real-time monitoring.
30-day monitoring
Daily checks against GSC, log files, rankings, and CWV with same-day response on regressions and a written close-out report.
Why Choose Me?
With 7+ years of experience and a track record of delivering results, I bring expertise, reliability, and a results-driven approach to every project.
- Engineering-led migration treated as the high-risk SEO project it is
- Six-source URL inventory rather than just a sitemap export
- Server or edge-level 301s — no JavaScript redirects, no chains
- Pre-launch SEO sign-off gate against staging
- 30-day monitoring window with incident response
- Rollback plan ready before cutover, not invented during the crisis
Starting at
€997
End-to-end migration: URL inventory, redirect engineering, staging QA, cutover runbook, GSC migration, and 30-day post-launch monitoring.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Further Reading
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Let's discuss your project and create a custom strategy for success.