Build & CMS
Website migration
A website migration is moving a site from one platform, domain or structure to another while keeping what has value: the content, the search rankings and the links other sites have already made to it.
The visible part of a migration is the rebuild. The part that determines whether it succeeds is the inventory beforehand: every indexable URL, what it earns, what links to it and what happens to it in the new structure. Pages nobody remembered, that quietly earned a third of the organic traffic, are found at this stage or six weeks after launch in an analytics chart.
Each old URL ends the inventory with one of four decisions: keep, improve, merge, or retire. Changed URLs get a permanent redirect, one hop, to the closest real equivalent. Retired pages return a genuine 404 or 410 rather than a soft redirect to the homepage, which search engines treat as an error anyway.
After launch the work is monitoring: indexing, traffic by template, and the difference between normal reprocessing and an actual problem. Some movement in the first weeks is ordinary. A sustained drop concentrated on one template is not, and usually points at a redirect rule rather than at content.
Website migration to WebflowBuild & CMS