A third of the blog gone. More traffic than before.

Everything changing at once

A UK furniture retailer, best known for its sofas, was moving from WordPress to a custom headless CMS. The site had more than 10,000 pages, and a platform move at that size carries risk on its own.

This one carried more than most. The business wanted to use the move to clean house. About a third of the blog was coming out, some older service pages were going with it, and every content page that stayed was being rewritten.

We normally advise the opposite order: migrate first, then change the content once Google has settled on the new site. When URLs, templates and copy all change on the same day, a ranking drop is hard to diagnose and harder to fix. Here, the content changes were part of the brief, so the plan had to absorb them.

Three months before launch

Most of the work happened before anything went live. We spent three months on the technical and content groundwork:

• A technical audit of the old site and the new build
• A benchmark of every existing page: what it ranked for, and the traffic and links it carried
• Working alongside the in-house writers as they rewrote pages, so the new copy kept the keywords, topics and tone that were already earning rankings
• A redirect map for every page being removed, pointing each one to the most relevant content still on the site

That last point mattered most for the pruned blog posts. Some still had rankings and links. The business had its own reasons for removing them, which we respected, but the value those pages had built up didn't need to disappear with them.

The same care went into commercial pages like the sofa ranges and into the informational content. Both were changing, and both had rankings worth protecting.

The project drew on our SEO migration and technical SEO work.

Two months after launch

In the first month after launch, keyword visibility dipped slightly. That's normal while Google recrawls a site, follows the redirects and reassesses rewritten pages.

By the second month the new pages were indexed and the redirects had been picked up. Clicks, impressions and traffic all climbed past their pre-migration levels. On average, organic traffic ended up 14% higher and keyword visibility 33% higher than before the move.

The new site had less content than the old one and performed better. That's the standard we hold migrations to. Protecting traffic is the minimum; the aim is to hand over a site that is in better shape than the one it replaced, and ready to grow from.