Redesigning your website is exciting—but it also comes with a risk: losing the SEO visibility you’ve worked so hard to build. Monitoring performance during a web design migration is crucial to identify and resolve issues early and recognize opportunities for improvement.

If you’ve been climbing the rankings for years, a poorly managed migration could tank your traffic overnight. And unfortunately, we’ve seen that happen when businesses work with developers or designers who overlook the SEO implications of a rebuild. Digital marketing plays a critical role in the overall strategy for improving SEO and user engagement during a web design migration.

At our agency, we specialize in modern, performance-focused web design and SEO-aware site migrations. We’ve helped clients move from WordPress to headless CMS platforms like Astro + Storyblok or Contentful—without sacrificing rankings or leads.

Here’s how we make it happen.

Why SEO Loss Happens During a Site Migration

When your site structure or tech stack changes, it can disrupt how Google and other search engines crawl, index, and rank your content. Here’s what typically goes wrong:

URLs change without proper redirects in place
Metadata gets lost (like page titles and meta descriptions)
Top-performing pages disappear or are consolidated poorly
Internal links break or lead to dead ends
Performance declines, especially with heavier visual redesigns
Structured data and schema are removed or not replaced

All of these issues can cause a drop in organic visibility—especially if they’re not caught early. Monitoring for crawl errors is crucial to quickly identify and resolve these issues.

Search engine crawlers play a vital role in indexing and ranking your content. Ensuring your website is accessible to both users and search engine crawlers is essential for maintaining SEO performance.

Pre-Migration Planning

Understanding the Impact of Website Migration on SEO

Website migration can significantly impact your SEO performance, making it crucial to understand the potential effects before diving into the process. A well-executed migration can enhance your SEO, but a poorly managed one can substantially lose organic traffic and search engine rankings. Considering how the migration will affect your website architecture, internal links, and overall SEO performance is an important step in the process. By planning meticulously, you can mitigate risks and ensure that your organic traffic remains stable or even improves post-migration.

Creating a Migration Checklist

A comprehensive migration checklist is vital for a smooth transition. This checklist should cover all critical tasks to ensure nothing is overlooked:

Backing up the current site: Ensure all data, including content, images, and databases, is safely stored.
Creating a staging site: Test the new site in a controlled environment before going live.
Mapping old URLs to new URLs: Prevent broken links and maintain SEO equity by redirecting old URLs to their new counterparts.
Updating internal links: Ensure all internal links point to the correct new URLs.
Creating a new XML sitemap: Generate an updated sitemap reflecting the new site structure.
Submitting the new sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools: Inform search engines about the new site structure to facilitate proper indexing.
Monitoring website performance and analytics: Keep a close eye on the site’s performance post-migration to quickly address any issues.

By following this migration checklist, you can ensure a seamless transition and maintain your site’s SEO performance.

Our Web Design & Migration Workflow

We’ve developed a step-by-step migration process that keeps your SEO intact and sets you up for better performance long-term.

A successful migration is crucial for maintaining SEO performance and ensuring that your website continues to rank well in search engine results.

Our process involves close collaboration with your web development team to handle technical aspects like 301 redirects, schema markup, and managing 404 errors, ensuring a smooth migration and optimal website performance.

1. Audit the Existing Site

We start with a full technical and content audit, emphasizing the importance of compiling data from various sources to create a comprehensive inventory of URLs on the website:

Which pages rank highest?
Where are your backlinks pointing?
What’s your internal link structure?
Are there crawl issues or broken pages?

Google Analytics plays a crucial role in tracking user interactions, diagnosing issues such as 404 errors, and gathering essential SEO data to guide website redesigns and optimizations.

This becomes our SEO baseline and migration blueprint.

2. Content Mapping & URL Planning

Before we touch design or development:

We map every current URL to a destination in the new structure, ensuring that old URLs are properly mapped to new URLs to maintain SEO integrity.
If a page is going away, we redirect it properly.
We protect your top-ranking pages from accidental removal.
We handle duplicate URLs by creating an inventory of all current URLs and setting up 301 redirects to prevent issues with content management systems.

3. Design with SEO in Mind

Design isn’t just visual—it’s structural. We make sure:

Header tags (H1, H2, etc.) follow a clear hierarchy
Internal links are preserved and improved
The layout is crawlable and mobile-first
Performance, accessibility, and usability are front and center
The design is optimized for mobile devices to ensure fast loading times and a seamless user experience

Additionally, we prioritize mobile friendliness by implementing responsive design principles. This approach aligns with Google's mobile-first indexing, ensuring that our sites rank well and provide an excellent experience for users on mobile devices.

4. Develop in a Staging Environment

No surprises at launch:

We pre-test speed, schema, alt tags, and meta info, including assessing site speed through tools like Semrush's Site Audit
We use Lighthouse, Screaming Frog, and Search Console tools
We prep XML sitemaps, robots.txt, and all SEO-critical settings
We optimize page speed during development by using tools like Google's PageSpeed Insights to ensure fast load times and reduce bounce rates

5. Launch + Monitor

Once everything checks out, we go live:

All 301 redirects are activated
XML sitemaps are submitted to Google
We monitor traffic, indexation, and rankings daily for 30–90 days, emphasizing the importance of monitoring performance to identify and resolve issues early
Adjustments are made fast if anything goes off course

To mitigate traffic loss during the migration process:

Conduct thorough pre-launch testing to ensure all elements are functioning correctly
Maintain consistent URL structures where possible
Communicate changes to users and stakeholders to manage expectations

Technical Preparation

Backing Up the Current Site

Backing up your current site is a critical step in the migration process. This ensures that all your data, including content, images, and databases, is safely stored and can be restored if needed. Here’s how to do it effectively:

Create a backup of the website’s database: Use a reliable backup tool to save all database information.
Save all website files: This includes images, documents, and any other files associated with your site.
Store the backup files in a secure location: Use an external hard drive or cloud storage to keep your backup files safe.
Verify the backup files: Ensure that the backup files are complete and can be restored if necessary.

By following these steps, you can minimize the risk of data loss or downtime during the migration process, ensuring a successful website migration.

Our Secret Sauce: Performance-First Platforms

We’re not just doing visual redesigns—we’re rebuilding sites on faster, more flexible, and more scalable foundations.

Astro + Storyblok give us blazing-fast performance with full editor flexibility for your team
Contentful or Headless WordPress offer modern CMS architecture with powerful customization, highlighting the importance of content management systems in achieving business objectives and influencing SEO
All of our designs are built for SEO, speed, and conversion from the wireframe stage

Effective communication among web developers, SEO teams, project managers, and content teams is crucial to ensure a smooth migration.

We’re strategic about your platform—not just choosing what’s trendy, but what’s best for long-term growth.

Results We’ve Seen

We’ve helped brands rebuild and scale without losing SEO momentum. Here are a few anonymized outcomes:

✅ Preserved 100% of top 10 keyword rankings after a successful migration from WordPress → Storyblok. A comprehensive SEO migration plan was crucial in achieving this.
🚀 Reduced load time from 6.5s to 1.2s post-launch. Effective search engine optimization played a key role in these results.
📈 28% increase in organic traffic within 90 days after redesign

Ready for a Website Redesign Without the Risk?

Website migrations don’t have to cost you your SEO. With the right plan, they enhance your visibility, performance, and UX—not hurt it. A comprehensive website migration checklist is essential to ensure a smooth and effective process, avoiding SEO issues and improving search engine visibility.

If you’re thinking about a redesign or platform upgrade, let’s talk about how we can preserve your rankings and build something better. An SEO team is crucial for maintaining and enhancing organic visibility during and after the migration, as well as for monitoring and mitigating any potential drops in traffic. Book a migration audit →

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