Website Migrations

A website migration should grow your traffic, not gamble with it.

We help brands move platforms, rebuild information architecture, and roll out new designs without losing the organic visibility they’ve worked hard for.

From Chemist Warehouse to Penfolds, we’ve led hundreds of migrations where rankings, revenue, and tracking all come through the move in good shape.

Every platform has its own SEO blind spots, URL quirks, and technical constraints. Our role is to understand how search engines and AI-powered experiences see your stack, then build a migration plan that fits how your platform actually works.

We’ve worked across most major CMS and ecommerce setups, including some fairly messy custom builds. Recent migrations have involved moves to:

Shopify

For Shopify migrations, our focus is on managing the platform's rigid URL structure and ensuring the smooth transfer of product and collection data. We optimise the theme's core performance and utilise Shopify's built-in features to maintain search visibility post-launch.

Commerce Tools

Migrating to Commerce Tools requires specialised expertise in site architecture and API endpoints. We focus on defining the content delivery pathways to ensure search engines can crawl and index your dynamic product catalog efficiently.

AEM (Adobe Experience Manager)

When migrating content to AEM, our strategy centers on mastering its complex content hierarchy and governance model. We ensure proper configuration of dispatcher caching and URL management rules to deliver fast, SEO-friendly experiences at scale.

Odoo

For Odoo migrations, we concentrate on aligning the ERP system's integrated web features with SEO best practices, particularly for e-commerce or portal sites. Our process includes fine-tuning the dynamic content output and managing the impact of different language/region settings.

Headless Builds

Migrating to a Headless Build demands technical expertise in rendering strategies, specifically ensuring content is fully hydrated and visible to search engine crawlers. We work closely with developers to implement server-side rendering (SSR) or dynamic rendering, guaranteeing performance without sacrificing crawlability.

Every platform has its quirks. Our job is to understand how Google, Bing, and AI-powered search experiences see your new site, then de-risk the move.

Website migrations are rarely small. They bring together marketing, product, IT, agencies, and boards, and often run alongside broader rebrand or growth programs. That’s why brands tend to call us in for the bigger moves.

We’ve supported migrations for organisations of all sizes, including:

These projects range from multi-country ecommerce builds to large, content-heavy sites with complex stakeholder and development teams.

There’s no single “correct” migration template, but there are key phases that reduce risk and keep everyone aligned. 

We tailor the depth of each step to your timeline, budget, and internal capability.

Our SEO migration process is designed to ensure a smooth transition, protect your valuable organic search and AI visibility, and set your new site up for maximum growth.

Discovery and Scope

The process begins with a deep dive into your business objectives. We work to understand your goals for the new site—whether they focus on increasing traffic, revenue, leads, or expanding into new markets and technologies. We then map current performance, capturing baselines for traffic, revenue, key landing pages, and the organic mix. Finally, we identify risk areas, such as fragile rankings, legacy content, or unique templates, to prioritise protection efforts.

Technical and Content Audit (Current Site)

Before the move, we conduct a thorough audit of your existing website. We will crawl and benchmark your existing site to understand its technical health. We catalogue high-value URLs and templates that must be preserved and document technical issues worth fixing before or during the migration. This step allows us to prioritise what must be protected versus what can be strategically trimmed.

URL Mapping and Redirect Strategy

This is the most critical phase for preserving SEO equity. We create detailed URL mapping from every old URL to its new counterpart. We design redirect rules that are realistic for your developers to implement efficiently, and meticulously handle edge cases like parameters, faceted navigation links, blog archives, and PDFs. We also plan tracking and analytics continuity across domains or subdomains to ensure zero data loss.

Information Architecture and On-Page Foundations

With the new platform in sight, we optimise its core structure. We refine site structure and internal linking to distribute authority effectively across the new build. We align collections/categories/content hubs with current search demand and set essential metadata, headings, and content briefs for all critical templates. The goal is to make sure new templates are search and AI-friendly from day one.

Pre-Launch QA

Testing is essential to catch and fix errors before launch day. We test staging environments with real crawl simulations. We rigorously check redirects, canonical tags, hreflang, structured data, and indexation controls. We aim to flag issues early so the development team can fix them, preventing launch-day crises, and confirming that analytics, events, and ecommerce tracking are ready to go.

Launch Support

On launch day, our team is an extension of yours. We are "on call" for launch to sanity-check changes in real time. We validate redirects, robots rules, and XML sitemaps the moment they go live. Throughout the immediate transition, we closely watch key landing pages and revenue-driving areas as organic traffic begins to shift to the new domain.

Post-Launch Monitoring and Tuning

The work continues long after the site is live. We track rankings, traffic, and conversions against the pre-migration baselines. Our priority is to quickly identify any pages that slipped and implement recovery strategies. Finally, we continuously refine internal links, fill content gaps, and resolve technical issues that are only revealed under real-world traffic conditions, providing clear reporting to all stakeholders on the move's impact.

The most successful migrations occur when SEO & AI is integrated into the development process from the very first sprint. We operate as an extension of your team, ensuring SEO requirements are met proactively rather than reactively.

• Join project stand-ups and sprint planning where helpful to provide real-time SEO context.
• Work inside your existing channels (Slack, Teams, email, Jira, Asana) for efficient communication.
• Provide clear, developer-friendly tickets with specific examples and acceptance criteria.
• Review templates and components early—not just waiting for the final "finished site."
• Act as a second set of eyes on site performance, accessibility, and crawlability during the build.

Your developers remain in full control of the build, but they have the SEO context needed to avoid wasting time re-doing work or fixing critical issues after the site goes live.

Our scope adjusts to suit your platform and goals, though there are common themes across most migrations. The focus is preserving what already works, fixing what holds you back, and giving the new site a cleaner base to grow from.

Technical and structure

Technical stability is non-negotiable. We focus on the parts of your setup that influence how easily search engines can crawl, understand, and index the new site.

• Redirects and URL mapping
• Indexing and crawl issues
• Canonical tags, and hreflang
• Page load and Core Web Vitals
• Site architecture and navigation
• Template structure (collections, PDP, blog, location, etc.)
• HTML and XML sitemaps
• Internal link structure

Content and relevance

Content sends the strongest signals about what each page should rank for. During a migration, we tidy up duplication, improve targeting, and make sure key pages stay aligned with demand.

• Keyword and topic research for the new structure
• On-page optimisation (titles, meta descriptions, headings)
• Content consolidation to reduce duplication
• Content gap analysis for key journeys and markets
• Image alt text and media optimisation

Authority and tracking

Protecting hard-won authority and clean data is just as important as URLs and content. We make sure you don’t lose visibility or measurement along the way.

• Backlink profile review and risk assessment
• Preservation of high-value links and pages
• Analytics, goals, events, and ecommerce tracking
• Baseline and post-launch reporting

The best way to judge a migration partner is to see how they’ve handled high-stakes projects. Below are two short examples from recent work.