Website migration

A migration can be a platform change, a domain change, a new URL structure, or all three at once alongside a redesign. The risk is the same in each case: search engines and other sites point at your current URLs, and anything that changes without a plan loses the traffic and authority attached to it.

Rankings are lost in three ways. URLs change without a redirect, on-page signals such as titles, headings, alt text and structured data are not rebuilt, or the new site has crawl problems like a stray noindex, a blocking robots.txt or broken canonicals. Control those three and a migration does not have to cost rankings.

Why it matters for a SaaS website

For many SaaS companies organic search is a real share of pipeline, built over years of content. A careless move can wipe out traffic to the pages that convert best: comparison pages, integration pages and high-ranking blog posts. The cheap version of a migration, a content transfer without a redirect map, usually looks fine on launch day and shows the damage three weeks later.

How DesignMe handles it

We treat SEO preservation as a named deliverable, not a launch-day task. Before the build we crawl every URL, export top landing pages and rankings from Search Console and Ahrefs, list the URLs with backlinks, and document on-page SEO. Every old URL gets a decision in a spreadsheet: same URL, new URL with a 301 redirect, or retired with a redirect to the closest relevant page. We rebuild metadata, headings, schema and internal links, launch early in the week and monitor for three to four weeks. A proper migration of a typical SaaS marketing site takes six to eight weeks. We learned this the hard way: our own relaunch had a short traffic dip from redirect gaps, which we caught in Ahrefs and fixed with a clean 301 map.

Example

Say a fintech company moves 180 WordPress URLs to Webflow and drops the date folders from its blog URLs. The audit shows 22 posts with backlinks and 9 pages driving most sign-ups. The redirect map sends each old post to its new slug in one hop, merges three thin category pages into one resource hub, and points a retired webinar page to the events page instead of the homepage. Search Console gets a fresh sitemap on launch day.

Common mistakes

• Redirecting everything to the homepage. Google may treat it as a soft 404. Redirect to the closest relevant page.
• Redirect chains. Old URL to intermediate to final wastes crawl time. Make every redirect a single hop.
• Removing redirects too soon. Google advises keeping them for at least a year.
• Launching on a Friday. Problems surface in the first days, so launch when someone is watching.