Услуга · Websites and web development

Migration from other CMS

Changing platform is the most dangerous episode in the life of a site as far as search is concerned. Moving the content is technically simple; keeping the rankings built up over years is not something everyone manages, and the losses almost always come from page addresses.

URLs
kept or redirected
Content
together with images
Check
of indexing afterwards
Rollback
we keep the old one switched on

What the work includes

Two thirds of the project is preparation and reconciliation, and only a third is the data transfer itself.

Discuss the scope

Inventory

The full list of pages present in the index. The redirect map starts from it.

Transfer

Texts, product records, images and files move across, and the section structure is preserved.

URL map

A mapping of old addresses to new. Not a single page should lead nowhere.

Redirects

Page by page, with the correct response code. A blanket redirect to the home page wipes out what was accumulated.

Reconciliation

We count the volumes and check links, images, forms and speed.

Monitoring

We watch indexing and rankings for the first weeks and fix what we find straight away.

How it goes

Three to six weeks depending on scope. We switch over on a quiet weekday, not on a Friday evening.

01

A review of the old one

What we move, what we discard, which addresses matter. We export the list from the index.

02

Building the new site

Development on a test address closed to search engine crawlers.

03

Migration and checking

Migration, a redirect map, an end-to-end check.

04

Switching

We change the domain, submit the new sitemap and watch the indexing.

The list of indexed pages must be exported before the work starts, not afterwards. Once you switch over, the old addresses cannot be gathered anywhere: the webmaster console shows only the new ones and the search results refresh. Without that list the redirect map is built by guesswork and part of the traffic is lost for good.

Questions and answers

With a careful migration the dip is small and recovers within a month or two. Those who lose are the ones who change addresses without redirects or dump everything onto the home page. A page-by-page map is the main insurance against that.

Technically you can, but it is worth thinking about: if nothing changes outwardly, why change platform. More often a migration is combined with a redesign, since everything is being rebuilt anyway.

Leave it switched off together with its database for at least a few months. That is insurance: if a section turns out not to have moved, there will be somewhere to get it from. Deleting it right after the switch is a bad idea.

We will migrate the site without losses

Write what the site is and where it is moving to. We will start by exporting the pages from the index.