Site migrations without the traffic cliff.
Redesigns, replatforms, domain changes, and site mergers all carry the same risk: years of search equity, lost in an afternoon. We map, redirect, test, and monitor - the part of the project that too often nobody invoiced for.
The usual way a site loses half its organic traffic: the new site goes live on a Friday, the old URLs die, and nobody has mapped where they should go. The dev team shipped what was scoped, and redirects weren't in the scope.
We do this work all the time, and it's a bigger job than anyone budgets for, which is why it gets skipped so often and why we run it as a service in its own right.
What a migration done properly involves
- Full URL inventory: every page, file, and parameter variant that exists today, from the CMS, the crawl, analytics, and Search Console. The pages you forgot about still have links and rankings.
- Content mapping decides where each page's subject and equity lives on the new site. Not everything gets a twin, so the map settles which pages consolidate, which redirect, and which are allowed to die deliberately.
- 301 redirect map: one-to-one wherever possible, built before launch and version-controlled. A blanket redirect to the homepage is the usual reason equity doesn't carry over.
- Domain changes need a Search Console change-of-address, canonical hygiene, and the sequencing that stops old and new competing with each other.
- Pre-launch testing runs the map against staging before anyone presses the button, rather than finding the gaps in production.
- Post-launch monitoring: crawl errors, redirect chains, rankings, and traffic watched through the settling period, with fixes shipped as things surface.
Done properly, a migration is a non-event: traffic carries on, and often grows on the back of the new site. When it goes wrong it's carnage, with people arriving from search and social hitting 404s and traffic and trust lost together. And it almost always costs more to fix after launch than the mapping would have cost before it.
"We've worked with 3WH for several years across SEO, website migrations, analytics and tracking. I've always been impressed by the depth of knowledge and expertise they bring, along with their practical approach to getting things done. They've taken the time to understand our business and have consistently delivered what they promised. I've really valued the relationship we've built over the years and consider 3WH a trusted digital partner."
We've done this before
TASK Group
Three websites merged into one. Rankings protected throughout.
INTRO Travel
From 2 tours to 40+. Year on year growth across every channel.
Office Products Depot
One national storefront for 23 dealers, and one budget behind it.
Questions we get asked
Our developers say they'll handle the redirects. Isn't that enough?
Sometimes. But we've cleaned up after a lot of launches where it wasn't. Devs are paid to ship the new site, and redirect mapping is often nobody's line item, so it never got scoped or invoiced and then it never got done. Or a blanket redirect sends every old URL to the homepage, which Google treats as a soft 404. The work itself is straightforward, but it only happens if somebody owns it.
When should we involve you?
Before the URL structure is final - that's when moving things is free. We can rescue a migration after launch, but you'll spend some traffic while we do.
How long does the risk period last?
Expect turbulence for a few weeks as Google recrawls, with the picture settling over one to three months depending on site size. We monitor rankings, crawl errors, and traffic through that window, and fix problems as they show up.
Do you handle site mergers, not just replatforms?
Yes - mergers are the harder version, and we've done them at company scale. When TASK Group brought multiple company sites into one, search visibility stayed strong through the process. The job is mapping content and equity from several domains into one structure without cannibalising anything.
Want this handled properly?
Tell us where you're at. We'll tell you what we'd do - and what it costs.