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Moving without losing what you already earned.
Most rebuild horror stories are the same story: the new site launched, the old URLs stopped existing, and 6 years of search rankings went with them. It's completely preventable and almost nobody prevents it.
By request
Mapped before cutover
How a migration goes wrong
A page builder generates URLs nobody chose. The rebuild generates different ones. Unless somebody sits down and maps every old address to its replacement, every link anyone ever built to you now points at a 404, and the rankings those links earned evaporate over the following weeks.
Traffic doesn't drop on launch day. It drops 6 weeks later, when nobody is looking.
How we do it
- Inventory first. Every live URL pulled from the existing sitemap and crawl, before a single new page is built.
- A mapped redirect for each one. We've moved a 28-page site this way, with each old address landing on its real replacement instead of being dumped on the homepage, which search engines treat as a soft 404.
- Junk pruned on purpose. One site we scoped was serving about 70 pages of a real-estate demo theme, fake agent profiles, made-up listings, blog posts about Miami condos, all live and indexed on a wastewater engineering domain. Those get removed.
- A link check that gates the build. Our build fails if a previously published URL stops resolving. It isn't a report. You can't deploy past it.
Rescues
Sometimes the site doesn't need replacing. It needs somebody to look at it. Tracking that never fired, a social preview image that returns a 404, a brand font every browser is rejecting, security headers that were never set. We'll tell you if that's the cheaper answer, and it often is.