CRITICAL SEO

Recovery After Failed Migration

A migration should not cost you your rankings. If your traffic dropped after moving to a new domain, design, CMS, or URL structure, we find exactly what broke in the transition and repair it before the losses become permanent.

The problem

The new website is live. It looks better, loads better, and everyone was proud of the launch. Then the traffic reports came in.

Rankings you held for years are gone. Pages that used to bring customers no longer appear in Google. Organic traffic is a fraction of what it was, and the agency or team that built the new site insists everything was done correctly.

Migrations are one of the most common causes of serious SEO damage. A single missing detail in the transition, a broken redirect map, changed URLs, removed content, or blocked pages, can erase years of accumulated authority. And because the damage shows up days or weeks after launch, it often gets blamed on everything except the migration itself.

There is a limited window to act. Google is currently re-evaluating your new site. The longer the errors stay live, the more your old rankings dissolve and the harder they are to win back.

Traffic dropped shortly after launching the new website

Rankings disappeared for keywords you held for years

Old URLs return errors or redirect to the wrong pages

Important pages are missing from Google's index

Sales and enquiries fell even though the new site looks better

Every week the numbers get a little worse

Why this is hard

A migration touches everything at once: URLs, content, internal links, templates, technical setup, sometimes the domain itself. When traffic drops afterwards, the cause is hidden somewhere in hundreds or thousands of changed elements. Guessing which one is responsible does not work.

The usual response makes things worse. Teams start “optimising” the new site: rewriting content, adding pages, adjusting titles. But if the core transition is broken, if redirects are missing, signals were lost, or sections are unreachable to Google, none of that surface work matters. The foundation has to be repaired first.

There is also a political problem. The people who executed the migration are rarely the right people to audit it. Reviewing your own work objectively under pressure is hard for anyone. An independent, evidence-based review removes the arguing and shows what actually happened.

Find what broke in the move.

We’ll trace the migration, identify where signals were lost and show you exactly what needs to be repaired to recover visibility.

Already migrated and losing traffic? That is this service. Planning a migration and want it done right the first time? See our Website Migration service, where we design and supervise the entire transition. And once your site is stable again, SEO Monitoring & Prevention makes sure the next change never goes unnoticed.

How we solve it

A failed migration leaves a trail of evidence. Our process follows it, from what the old site was to what the new site became.

We map the full scope of the migration

Domain, URLs, CMS, hosting, design, content, structure: we document everything that changed between the old website and the new one. Recovery starts with knowing exactly what was touched.

We compare the old site against the new one

Using crawls, archives, and historical data, we rebuild the picture of the old website and compare it page by page with the current one: which URLs existed, where they redirect, what content survived, and what quietly disappeared.

We identify exactly what broke

Missing or incorrect redirects, lost pages, changed content, blocked sections, technical regressions, weakened internal linking. Each problem is documented with evidence and ranked by how much damage it is causing.

We stabilise and restore what the migration lost

The most destructive errors get fixed first: redirect chains and gaps, indexing blocks, and anything preventing Google from correctly connecting the old site to the new one. Content that carried rankings, pages that earned links, structures that Google trusted. We rebuild the lost signals on the new site in an organised, prioritised roadmap, working directly with your developers or guiding your team.

We monitor the reindexing until recovery

Google needs to re-crawl and re-evaluate the corrected site. We track indexing, rankings, and traffic through the entire re-evaluation period and adjust the plan until performance returns to a stable level.

What you get

A complete picture of what the migration broke, and a structured repair of every part of it.

Migration damage report

A clear, evidence-based explanation of what went wrong in the transition, which errors caused the traffic loss, and how severe each one is.

Corrected redirect and URL map

A verified mapping between the old website and the new one, with every broken, missing, or incorrect redirect identified and fixed.

Recovery roadmap

A prioritised plan for restoring lost pages, content, and signals, ordered by business impact, with the reasoning behind every step.

Reindexing and recovery tracking

Regular reviews of indexing, rankings, and traffic through Google’s entire re-evaluation of the corrected site, so you can see the recovery happening.

Client Hub access

Tasks, findings, reports, and recovery progress in one place, so you can see the site coming back without asking for updates.

Implementation support

We work directly with the team that maintains your new website, or implement the fixes ourselves. No finger-pointing, just repairs.

See how we've repaired failed migrations.

Real migration recovery projects, measurable improvements, and the strategies behind them.

Magento Migration Recovery

A sitewide redirect chain caused an almost 80% loss in organic traffic.

Organic traffic restored without reverting the new website

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A developer partner had redesigned an e-commerce website while keeping it on Magento. During the migration, redirects were mapped to URLs that had since changed and automatically redirected again, creating chains across the entire website. We corrected the redirect setup and restored the lost traffic without returning to the old design and structure.

OpenCart Migration Recovery

Missing SEO settings caused an almost 90% loss in organic traffic.

Traffic recovered within weeks, then peaked 128% above its pre-migration level

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The client replaced an OpenCart store with a better custom-built website, but essential SEO settings were missing from the new platform. We identified the gaps, prioritised the recovery work through a full SEO audit and followed it with additional technical improvements. Traffic returned within a few weeks. Two months later, it began growing beyond its pre-migration level and eventually peaked 128% higher.

Your migration went wrong. It can still be repaired.

Right now Google is re-evaluating your new website. Every week with broken signals makes the old rankings harder to recover.

Tell us what changed and when. We will assess the damage honestly and show you a clear path to getting your traffic back.