Redesign, same URLs Medium risk
New templates change the internal links, the mobile copy and often the tracking. I spell out what the templates need and test the site before and after launch.
SEO migration consultant
I’m Stanislav Baciu, an independent SEO migration consultant, in SEO since 2016. For a redesign, a new CMS or a domain change, I write the redirect map, test the new site before launch and audit it after.
Brands I’ve worked with: WordPress VIP, Yoast, Blocksy and AlphaSpread.
What kind of move is yours?
How much can go wrong depends on what changes for Google.
New URL structure High risk
Google has to recrawl and rank every changed URL again. This needs every step, from the redirect map to the audit after launch.
New CMS or platform High risk
The URLs, the templates and the way pages render usually change at once. On top of the redirect work, I check how Google renders the new templates.
Domain change or merging two sites High risk
Every URL changes, and so does the domain. You also need a Change of Address in Search Console, and I watch the old and new properties.
Hosting or CDN only Low risk
Only the server changes. A crawl before and after the switch is usually enough.
New site Slow start
Nothing to lose yet, but Google can be slow to index a new site. I plan the structure and templates for search before design starts.
Google’s site move guide says to change one thing at a time. If yours changes several, I set up the comparison so you can still tell what each change did.
SEO migration services: what you get, and when
A call about your launch
You tell me what’s changing, when and who’s building it. I tell you what the move needs.
A redirect map
A spreadsheet of every old URL, its new URL and its status code. Your developers build the redirects from it.
A migration plan for your developers
What the new site needs for search, written before they start building: redirects, canonicals, robots rules, sitemaps, structured data and tracking.
Testing the new site before launch
I check the staging site against the plan, template by template. On launch day I check the live site with your developers.
An audit after launch
A crawl of the live site, with a severity and an owner for each issue. Then clicks and rankings before and after, URL by URL.
The website migration SEO checklist
Before launch
Before launch
List every old URL, PDFs included. Pull them from the sitemaps, a crawl, a CMS export, backlinks and 16 months of Search Console data through the API.
A crawl misses pages nothing links to, and Search Console’s own export stops at 1,000 rows. Pages still earning clicks end up as 404s.
Record clicks per URL, leads by landing page and the pages AI assistants cite for a fixed set of prompts. Do it for the weeks before launch and the same weeks last year.
Without it, nobody can say which URLs lost traffic, or whether those weeks dipped last year too.
Decide what happens to each old URL: keep, redirect, merge or 410. Before merging two pages, check which URL Google ranks for each one’s main queries.
Merged pages usually lose the most, because the page that absorbs them often doesn’t rank for the old page’s narrower query.
Redirect each old URL to its closest new page with one server-side 301 or 308, never all to the homepage.
Google can treat mass redirects to the homepage as soft 404s, as if the old pages were gone.
On a JavaScript rebuild, check the links and copy in each template’s served HTML. Make sure robots.txt doesn’t block the data the templates load.
A rule like
Disallow: /api/can leave Google rendering empty pages, and most AI crawlers don’t run JavaScript.Submit every form on staging and check that each lead and signup event fires in GA4, by name. Check again daily from launch.
A generic form event can keep firing after the named events stop, so leads look like they collapsed on launch day.
Launch day
Launch day
Check the status code of every old URL without following redirects, on staging and live. Each needs one 301 or 308 to a page that returns 200.
A browser (or
curl -L) shows only the final page, which hides 302s, chains and redirects to pages nobody built.Check that every template says index on the live domain, in the meta robots tag, the X-Robots-Tag header and robots.txt. Check again after every deploy.
The staging noindex goes live, or a later deploy from staging brings it back.
Search the canonicals, hreflang and internal links for the staging hostname and old URLs.
A canonical pointing to staging or to a redirect tells Google to index the wrong page.
Submit the new sitemap. On a domain move, file a Change of Address for every verified version of the old domain, www and non-www included.
Otherwise Google gets no direct signal that the site moved, and finds the new URLs more slowly.
After launch
After launch
Check the status of every URL on the pre-launch list again.
A crawl only finds linked pages, so an old URL now returning 404 never shows up in it.
Once the new URLs are indexed, re-run the baseline prompts.
Otherwise a lost AI citation goes unnoticed.
Keep the redirects for at least a year, as Google advises, and through any later CMS or hosting change.
Otherwise old links return 404 and stop counting for the new URLs.
How I judge whether the migration worked
The same weeks last year
I compare equal periods either side of launch, plus the same dates a year earlier. If traffic dropped in those weeks last year too, with no relaunch, the dip is seasonal.
Clicks by what happened to each URL
Every URL that had clicks before launch was kept, redirected or merged. I add up each group’s clicks, old and new URL together. That turns “traffic fell” into a list of pages to fix.
Migration and launch work
WordPress VIP: a 38-page rebuild with new design, code and URLs
WordPress VIP
A 38-page rebuild with new design, code and URLs
On this WordPress rebuild, I owned the redirect strategy, checked every live URL against staging and flattened redirect chains before launch. I also added JSON-LD structured data across the templates and set the SEO rules the team kept after launch.
AI tool launch: 50 to 5,000 daily clicks within five months of launch
AI tool launch
50 to 5,000
daily clicks within five months of launch
There was no product and no website when I started. After three months of planning with the product, design and development teams, the site went live and Google indexed it right away.
“Stan served as our SEO strategist for the WordPress VIP website rebuild, a complex, multi-month project covering 38 pages across enterprise SaaS, media, government, and partner audiences.”
Questions about hiring an SEO migration consultant
Will we lose rankings or traffic, and for how long?
Usually some, while Google recrawls the old and new URLs. Google says a medium-sized site can take “a few weeks or more” before the new URLs show, and large sites take longer.
Domain changes take the longest. In Dan Taylor’s study of 1,052 domain migrations, the median site took 304 days to get its old traffic back, and 13.9% still hadn’t after three years.
When should we bring you in?
Before the design is signed off, while URLs and templates are still cheap to change. Closer to launch, the redirect map and staging checks still work, but a wrong template usually ships as it is.
Our developers or agency say they handle SEO. Why bring in a consultant?
Because the build is only part of it. Your developers can handle the redirects and the sitemap. Deciding which URLs to keep, which pages to merge and what the numbers mean after launch falls between teams.
I make those calls with them, and the person on our call is the person who checks your staging site.
Our traffic already dropped after a launch. Can you help?
Yes. I start by ruling out the fast causes: 404s and redirect chains on old URLs, a staging noindex, canonicals pointing at the wrong host, and lead events that stopped firing.
How long does it take, and what does it cost?
It depends mostly on how many URLs you have and what’s changing. We agree the timing, scope and fee on the discovery call.
Have a launch date?
Book a call and tell me what’s changing and when. I’ll tell you what kind of move it is and which checks it can’t launch without.
Book a discovery call