The Project
An enterprise client was migrating from a legacy CMS to a headless platform. Previous migrations across their business had cost 20–40% of organic traffic for six months while rankings recovered. The board was understandably nervous.
Approach
We ran a six-week pre-migration audit: every URL crawled, classified, mapped to a destination. Schema parity was tested in a staging environment. Internal linking graphs were compared pre/post. CWV regressions were caught in CI before the cutover. The redirect map was tested with synthetic monitors before going live.
Cutover
The cutover ran on a Thursday afternoon — deliberately, so any issues could be triaged with the full team present. Real-time monitoring tracked indexation, ranking and conversion through the first 72 hours. No emergency fixes were required.
Outcome
Zero ranking loss across 12,000 migrated URLs. Indexation recovered to parity within 18 days. Conversion rates uplifted 14% post-migration thanks to the parallel CWV improvements. The CMO sleeps better.