Service · Websites and web apps

CMS migration

From the point of view of Google, changing your content management system is the riskiest moment in the life of a website. Moving text and images out of Joomla, Drupal, Wix or a home-grown CMS from a decade ago is technically simple. Keeping the visibility you built up over years is harder, and the sites that lose traffic are almost always the ones that changed their URLs and forgot about redirects.

URL map
address by address
Content
with images and attachments
Checks
in Search Console
Plan B
the old version kept in reserve

Included in this service

Most of the effort goes in before switchover day and just after it. Importing the content is usually the shortest stage of the whole project.

Talk the scope through with an engineer

Inventory

A complete list of URLs from a crawl, the sitemap, Search Console, Google Analytics 4 and your inbound link profile. Only the combination of these sources shows what really has to move.

Content transfer

Copy, products, categories, images, PDF files, authors and publication dates. Wherever possible through an API or a database export rather than manual copying.

Redirect map

Every old address is paired with a new equivalent, so that pages with traffic or backlinks do not end up returning a 404.

301 redirects

Implemented page by page, without chains or loops. Sending everything to the home page in bulk looks to Google as if the content has disappeared.

Metadata

Titles, descriptions, alt attributes, canonical URLs, hreflang and structured data travel with the content, not at some later date.

Pre-launch checks

We compare page counts and check links, images, forms, speed and cookie consent on a test version closed to crawlers.

Post-migration care

In the first few weeks we regularly review indexing and 404 reports and fix anything that slipped through.

How we work together

Timing depends on the number of pages and how tidy the data is. We schedule the switch for a quiet midweek day rather than a Friday afternoon.

01

Analysis

What moves, what gets tidied, what is dropped and which URLs matter most. The list comes from Search Console, a crawl and analytics.

02

New site

Built on a test address blocked from search engines, with a trial content import.

03

Migration and testing

Full import, redirect map deployed and a review of every group of pages.

04

Switchover

DNS change, crawler block lifted, new sitemap submitted in Search Console and daily monitoring of indexing.

The most common migration mistake is a crawler block carried over from staging to production. A “Disallow: /” line in robots.txt or a noindex tag that protected the test site survives the switch. The site looks fine while Google starts dropping it from the index. Checking for this is the first item on our launch day list.

Questions and answers

With a careful migration any dip tends to be small and temporary. Heavy losses hit those who changed URLs without redirects or pointed everything at the home page. A URL map built address by address is the single best insurance.

Usually yes: if the site is being rebuilt anyway, copying the old design one to one rarely makes sense. Avoid changing URLs, structure, content and domain all at once, though. The fewer variables shift together, the easier it is to explain any drop.

Keep it switched off but complete, database included, for at least a few months. If a section or some attachments turn out to have been missed, we can retrieve them from there. Deleting the old site the day after launch is asking for trouble.

Yes, as long as the data format allows it. Passwords are stored as hashes in the format of the old system, so we either support that format at first login or ask users to set a new password. Transfers of personal data are recorded in your GDPR documentation.

Not necessarily, but it is a good moment to review the server: PHP or Node.js version, certificate, email on the domain. We can separate the hosting move from the CMS change so that each can be monitored on its own.

Change your CMS without losing traffic

Tell us which platform your site runs on today and where you want to go. We will start by collecting the list of indexed URLs.

Hours
Mon-Fri 8:00-18:00 CET, reply within one working day
Meetings
Online via Teams or Google Meet

We set strictly necessary cookies only: they keep the site running and remember the city you chose. Nothing here is used for advertising or tracking. More in our privacy policy.