Website Migration
SEO Audits
Don’t panic - this isn’t overly uncommon and in most cases is relatively straightforward to fix. For £150p/h we can provide full support to help recover rankings and traffic after any website migration.
Trusted By Leading Brands
We've helped hundreds of businesses resolve complex SEO issues and achieve sustainable organic growth.
Have you recently changed your website?
Don’t panic - this isn’t overly uncommon and in most cases is relatively straightforward to fix. For £150p/h we can provide full support to help recover rankings and traffic after any website migration.
We support businesses who’ve:
And where their online visibility tanked + required subsequent support for recovery.
Migrated from Wordpress to Shopify
Wix to Wordpress
Webflow to Shopify
Wordpress to Vibe Coded Site
Wordpress to Framer
Framer to Squarespace
Gone through any CMS change
We’re fast - 8/10 clients had their audits within 2-3 weeks, fixes implemented within 2 weeks and ranking recovery shortly after.
We get things done - whether we need to liaise with your in-house developer or development agency, we take the bull by the horns and get the work done, we prioritise & sign off quickly.
£150
Per hour support
8/10
Audits within 2-3 weeks
2 wks
To fixes implemented
2
Part audit process
WEBSITE MIGRATIONS
Website migrations are popular worldwide, millions happen every year, where a website migrates from one platform to another. A website migration is a big deal when it comes to SEO & for revenue / lead generation - as getting it wrong can have a profound impact on not only organic visibility but conversion & revenue generation.
Website migrations carry risk for most businesses because there’s often a fair degree of complexity between switching from one CMS to another (or a custom build). Usually it only takes changing a CMS alone to have an impact on rankings, let alone getting any of it wrong.
This is where we come in, we are here to provide full SEO consulting, auditing & support to ensure your website migration goes as it should do - smoothly and without impact to rankings or traffic.
WHAT WE OFFER
We offer a professional website migration / website CMS migration support both through SEO consulting and through SEO auditing. If your website is going through a re-platform from one CMS to another i.e. wordpress to shopify, magento to shopify, squarespace to wix, wix to webflow, webflow to wordpress or is going to a custom built platform i.e .vibe coded CMS on top of say nextJS/reactJS/Vercel or headless via Sanity/Netlify then we can work with your brand to:
- Minimise any potential ranking loss as a result of the migration
- Maximise benefits of a replatform (improve on existing organic performance)
- Ensure maximum SEO compliance
- Help to spur onward growth over time
- Help to ensure your website is safe, secure, quick, mobile friendly, compliant etc
We can do this via:
We can do this via
SEO Consulting hours - you simply book consulting hours, we work with your brand/business/devs to audit, review, strategise, execute
SEO auditing - where we audit your old and new website, identify issues and highlight them to developers to action before go live
SEO retainer - where we agree x hours per month for £x cost (we provide you with a quotation) and we deliver SEO support over Slack, Teams, Email, Whatsapp etc.
THE RISKS OF A WEBSITE CMS MIGRATION
Migrating from one CMS to another carries SEO risk - primarily in the form of:
Traffic & Ranking losses from website structural changes - if migrating from one CMS to another or to a custom solution it’s very likely that the websites URL structure / nav structure will change, this can impact indexing, pagerank downflow and ultimately rankings. Structural changes can include canonicals, hreflang, URL consistency, trailing slash vs non trailing slash, www vs non www
Traffic & Ranking losses from rendering issues - if your website CMS migration sees you migrate on to a platform that has SEO issues or doesn’t provide server side rendering or support for pre-rendering this can create significant issues
Traffic & Ranking losses from misconfigured redirect maps / URL chains / redirect chains - often when CMS platforms change, the underlying URL architecture changes, this means a redirect map is required - basic mistakes can wreak havoc such as mishandled re-directs, re-direct chains etc.
Traffic & Ranking losses from deployment issues - this can be anything from firewalls, cloudflare configuration issues, deployment of robots.txt with a full site/domain disallow, stray noindex, nofollow tags
The main issues notable from a poor CMS migrations tend to be:
Randomly vanishing pages from the index i.e. homepage goes missing or random pages served in place of pages that used to rank
Sudden decline in reported pages indexed in Google Search Console or a sudden incline in non indexed pages
Sudden ranking losses - often with keywords seeing large declines or a complete drop out
Sudden traffic losses - often when rankings drop / vanish clicks and impressions tend to quickly follow
Revenue loss - less revenue generation i.e. product sales, conversions, sales, leads, enquiries etc
Site not being returned properly on brand searches
Randomised sitelink issues
Improperly handled URLS being indexed
Security issues
WHAT SHOULD HAPPEN PRIOR TO A WEBSITE CMS MIGRATION
So, this varies from website to website from tech stack to tech stack, but, the most GENERALISED approach is as follows:
Your pre-existing site Google search console data should be audited - to ascertain where traffic comes from and where it goes to (segment analysis) - this way, we can prioritise which pages to put more focus into for maximum ranking & traffic retention
Your pre-existing website indexing state should be assessed to see if a CMS change and a cascade of URL changes could trigger latent indexing issues. Pre-existing indexing issues should be addressed prior to a website migration
Your pre-existing website should be crawled to just assess structure, internal link configurations, anchors, canonicals and other important configurations
Your pre-existing content and link profile should be assessed to ascertain what content is of value, what’s decaying, what links point to which pages
Then, once we have a full picture of the current website including technical SEO state, indexing state, content quality etc. then we can audit the new website.
This typically involves:
Subject to addressing pre-existing SEO and page indexing issues, we then would conduct an SEO audit on the new website (staging environment usually)
We compare website configurations, technical stacks, rendering, internal links, navigation, content accessibility, layouts and more - so we can understand what the website is going from and to
We provide recommendations to fix, adjust and optimise the new website prior to CMS migration
We validate the fixes, when everything is done, we check everything including redirect maps, directives etc. before giving the go ahead
Once the CMS migration is done, we then perform all the required checks to ensure trouble free URL changes + indexing + to maximise retention of rankings/traffic
WHY GETTING A PRE CMS MIGRATION AUDIT IS A GOOD IDEA?
Because it can highlight things of key importance such as the pages driving most of the traffic (so we maximise like for like to minimise potential for loss). It helps to minimise potential SEO risk and to maximise potential SEO benefit.
Auditing the old website may uncover things that are crucial for the new website on the new CMS, so it's important to be mindful that CMS migrations are as much about getting the most from the old site as the new website as possible.
WHAT ARE YOU BUYING?
You are buying a service that is generally provided in SEO consulting hours, we provide deliverables including but not limited to:
- PDF / Google Slide documents for the audit with SEO Issue + Recommendation
- CMS Migration Checklist (Google / Excel Sheet) with prioritisation and work states
- Reports including work reports, ranking reports & email updates
Deliverables are depending on what you buy in terms of service support.
HOW MUCH DO CMS MIGRATION AUDITS COST?
Costs vary by website size, typical audit costs are:
£900 - £1500
Small websites (< 100 pages) - £900 - £1500 on average
£2500 - £5000
Medium websites ( 100 > 50k pages) - £2500 - £5000 on average
£5000 - £10000
Large websites (50k - 100k pages) - £5000 - £10000 on average
£10000
Massive websites (100k+ pages) £10000 onwards
Audits are broken into 2 parts:
PART 1 - pre-existing website audit which includes google search console analysis, technical audit, page indexing audit, content and link audit
PART 2 - new website audit - looking at old to new, looking at the CMS replatform, ensuring everything critical is dealt with, providing confirmation of optimal configuration
HOW DOES THE PROCESS WORK?
You can get us involved at almost any point, but for most site owners engagement is as follows:
You get in contact with us to discuss your project i.e. provide an overview of your CMS / website migration change or issues
We ask for search console access and staging site URL
We advise on what we think you need i.e. SEO auditing, consulting hours along with cost
If you move ahead, we sign rolling 30 day agreement, NDA and we provide SEO support via auditing / consulting - this can be done via communication apps such as SLACK, TEAMs etc. or via E-Mail or over project management platforms such as notion, asana, monday, Jira etc.
We provide the SEO audit / consulting, recommendations
We go through a process of submitting recommendations, reviewing implementation, signing off
We work onwards until the CMS migration is complete
We provide a fully bespoke service for our clients.
Each client is given a personalised service, we can hand-hold throughout the entire CMS migration process from start to finish, ensuring your switch is seamless and that traffic impact is minimised (or even improved).
Naturally, any CMS migration carries some degree of potential risk, we mitigate it by ensuring the technical configuration of the target CMS is optimal and that it’s quick and easy for crawlers and bots like Googlebot to be able to crawl the website with no impedance.
Get Migration SEO Support
If you are thinking of changing domain at the same time as changing CMS, we typically do not recommend doing this, we recommend only making 1 change at once, waiting for a while before embarking on anything else such as a domain change.
We also provide support for domain change / domain migrations to ensure those too do not go wrong taking away valuable clicks and revenue.
Talk To Us About Your Migration
Tell us which platform you are moving from and to, and we will advise on whether consulting hours or a full audit is the better fit.
