Website Design and Development
Migration execution
One part of Website Design and Development, described on its own: carry out the replatform without losing what the old site earned.
What does a migration execution actually involve?
Carry out the replatform without losing what the old site earned. In practice that means pre-migration inventory of URLs, traffic, rankings and inbound links, and then the harder half: a complete one-hop redirect map, tested before launch.
Why this work exists
Most of the cost here is not the work itself. It is the months spent on the wrong thing because nobody checked this first.
It sits inside Website Design and Development, which is the broader discipline, and it is the part people most often ask for by name.
The nearest piece of work to it is deciding what happens to the design when a headline runs to four lines. Where that is already handled, this moves faster than the estimate; where it is not, the two get done together or neither of them holds.
What good looks like
It is right when the exceptions are written down rather than remembered.
The gap between that and where most accounts start is why this is scoped as migration execution rather than as a line inside something larger. Getting the site fast on the hardware the audience owns is the usual second step once it is in place.
When this is the right work
Three observations mean this work is due:
- Launch is scheduled and the redirect map is incomplete
- Nobody has compared staging content against production page by page
- The plan has no rollback criteria
If none of those is true, something else is probably the constraint, and the Website Design and Development overview maps the alternatives. The usual neighbours are making the forms work for somebody using a keyboard only and finding the component that exists in nine slightly different versions.
What the work covers
Concretely, this covers:
- Pre-migration inventory of URLs, traffic, rankings and inbound links. Straightforward in principle; the detail is where it stops being quick.
- A complete one-hop redirect map, tested before launch. Usually scoped at half the size it turns out to be.
- Content and markup parity verification on staging, revisited rather than finished, because the inputs keep moving.
- Launch runbook with monitoring, and a defined rollback trigger, which is where most of the time goes and almost none of the budget.
How it runs
The shape of the work, stage by stage.
Before anything is changed
Nothing moves until the current position is written down and agreed. That takes days, not weeks, and it is the only defence against arguing about whether something improved.
The first pass
The obvious problems get fixed first, in one batch, so the picture clears before the harder judgement calls have to be made against a noisy background.
Where the judgement goes
What is left needs a decision rather than a fix. These get taken with whoever owns the consequence, not resolved quietly in a ticket.
What each part runs into
Where each part tends to meet resistance:
- Pre-migration inventory of URLs, traffic, rankings and inbound links – in Toronto, complicated by the fact that a sector mix that pulls the brief in several directions
- A complete one-hop redirect map, tested before launch, which in Jaipur runs into a seasonal peak that arrives before the content is indexed
- Content and markup parity verification on staging: the Gurugram version of this has to deal with a reporting line that averages away the market in question
- Launch runbook with monitoring, and a defined rollback trigger, where a Hyderabad engagement contends with a market where buyers qualify by area rather than by city
The version that does not work
Launching on a Friday. Problems surface in the first forty-eight hours and nobody is there to act on them.
It is worth stating because it is the version of this work that gets sold most often, and it fails in a way that looks like the discipline not working rather than the execution being wrong.
How it is measured
Traffic and ranking retention through launch, and redirect coverage. Reported monthly against a baseline taken before anything changed.
Measured the same way before and after, even where a better method became available halfway through.
What you end up with
You are left with a tested redirect map, verified parity, a launch runbook and a monitored stabilisation period.
Versioned, so the next pass starts from this one rather than from scratch.
How it differs by sector
Three sectors where this work looks materially different:
- In Education and training the binding constraint is that admission cycles, a parent paying for a student’s decision, and course-level demand.
- Nonprofit and NGO: the thing that changes the scope here is that two audiences with nothing in common: donors and the people served.
- For Healthcare and clinics, content that affects health decisions is held to a higher standard, and advertising is restricted. and that shapes how far this can go.
The industry pages carry the rest of that detail. Education and training and Nonprofit and NGO are the two where this piece of work most often decides the outcome.
Common questions
What is the most common migration mistake?
An incomplete redirect map, usually because the inventory came from the sitemap rather than from logs, analytics and backlink data together. URLs with no internal links but real external links are the ones that get missed, and they are often the ones carrying the most authority.
Should a migration be phased or done at once?
At once where the structure allows, because a phased migration means two sites, duplicate content risk and a redirect layer that has to work in both directions. Phasing makes sense for genuinely separable sections, and then each phase needs its own complete redirect handling.
What comes after this?
Whatever Traffic and ranking retention through launch, and redirect coverage shows. The next piece is scoped from the result rather than agreed in advance, because committing to it now would be guessing.
Does this work at our size?
The diagnosis does, at any size. Whether the work that follows is worth the money depends on what an improvement in traffic and ranking retention through launch, and redirect coverage is actually worth to the business, which is the first thing to settle. Two pages carry the detail this one summarises: Content and Editorial, and then Conversion Rate Optimization.
Can this be scoped on its own?
Yes, where the diagnosis says it is the constraint. More often it runs inside a Website Design and Development engagement, because the adjacent work is what makes the result hold. The scoping conversation settles which. Hosted site builder or Self-hosted CMS is the obvious next page from here. Smart bidding or Manual bidding is the one people wish they had read first.
Ask about migration execution
Say what the current setup looks like. We will say what we would change first and what we would leave alone.
Find out whether this is worth doing at all
Bring the numbers you have. We will tell you which ones are measuring the wrong thing before we suggest anything new.