Replatforming is mostly invisible work. Done right, nobody notices. Done wrong, rankings fall for months. Here's our checklist.
We recently moved more than 400 pages of an enterprise website onto WordPress. Migrations like this are rarely glamorous, but they're where a lot of hard-won search traffic and brand trust gets lost. The work that protects it happens before, during and after the switch.
Before: inventory everything
- Crawl the old site and export every URL, title, meta description and status code.
- Pull the top landing pages and backlinks from Search Console and your analytics.
- Mark every page as keep, merge or retire, with a reason.
- Note forms, scripts, tracking tags and integrations that live on each template.
During: map, don't guess
Every old URL needs a destination. Build a redirect map as a spreadsheet the whole team can review, and keep it one-to-one wherever possible. Redirecting hundreds of pages to the homepage is the fastest way to lose rankings.
Rebuild templates rather than pages. A migration is the right moment to fix structure (headings, internal links, image sizes and schema) once, in the template, instead of 400 times by hand.
Launch day
- Run the full redirect map against staging, then again against production.
- Submit the new sitemap and check Search Console coverage.
- Compare page speed and Core Web Vitals on the top 20 pages, old vs new.
- Test every form and conversion event end to end.
After: watch for four weeks
Expect some movement in rankings for a couple of weeks. Track 404s daily, fix missing redirects as they appear, and compare organic landing pages week over week. Most problems show up in the first fortnight, if you're looking.
A good migration is one your visitors never notice and your search console barely flinches at.
Security and performance belong in the plan from the start too: least-privilege accounts, updated plugins, caching and a CDN. It's much easier to launch clean than to clean up later.
Related services: Websites and web apps, Search engine optimisation.