Digital transformation ยท Migration
Putting SEO governance around a high-risk website migration
Technical SEO embedded before, during and after launch so a complex redesign could change without losing the signals that already worked.
A migration is a chain of decisions, not a launch-day checklist
Large redesigns and CMS changes touch architecture, rendering, templates, content, analytics and infrastructure at the same time. SEO risk often appears between teams: everybody completes their own task, but no one owns the behaviour of the whole system.
My role was to make that risk visible early and give delivery teams controls they could actually use across Umbraco, Drupal and custom platforms.
I joined the work before the new site became difficult to change
I established the baseline, reviewed architecture and prototypes, defined redirect and canonical requirements, and tested representative templates in staging. Requirements were written for the people implementing them, with examples, acceptance criteria and named owners.
- Priority URL and template baselines
- Redirect mapping and edge-case testing
- Rendered-content, metadata and structured-data QA
- Launch controls, monitoring and issue triage
Governance made the strategy durable
Playbooks, QA reports and joined-up working sessions created a shared view of what had to remain stable and what was intentionally changing. That gave developers clearer specifications and gave stakeholders a way to make trade-offs without relying on vague SEO warnings.
After launch, the same baseline and page groups were used to check what actually shipped, identify unexpected behaviour quickly and distinguish temporary movement from implementation faults.
The value was control over uncertainty
The programme reduced avoidable risk and made post-launch diagnosis faster. More importantly, it left the delivery team with a repeatable migration method rather than a one-off audit that disappeared after launch.
