Artur Karpiński joined SUSO in 2021, and his experience has been invaluable. He’s managed complex campaigns, overseen website migrations, and collaborated with technical teams from both clients and partners.
In our Q&A, Artur shares his seasoned perspective on the intricate process of website migrations, offering crucial advice for agencies aiming to safeguard and enhance their clients’ search performance.
He also presents a valuable behind-the-scenes view of how SUSO approaches working with partnering agencies on migrations. This is an important SEO topic, as website migrations present both an exciting opportunity for renewal and a risk of losing a significant amount of hard-won traffic.
SEO Q&A: How to Migrate Websites Without Losing Traffic
Q: Artur, how long have you been involved in managing page migrations with clients, and has SUSO always offered this type of support?
A: We’ve always aimed to assist our clients with all sorts of SEO needs, and migrations are part of that. However, over the last two years, we’ve ramped up our migration support.
This has led to an increase in these projects, and we’ve also started collaborating with partner agencies to assist their clients with migrations. Currently, I’m personally involved in managing six or seven migration projects.
Q: Do you primarily manage the SEO assistance for these migrations? How do you collaborate with outside teams?
A: It depends on the project.
If we work directly with a client, we collaborate with their in-house team and developers.
If a third-party development team is involved, sometimes we work directly with them, and other times we communicate through the client.
Every project is unique, and one of the biggest challenges is always aligning responsibilities and duties and ensuring clear communication.
When we work with partner agencies, they often also collaborate with a development agency and the client.
So, there are many players involved. It all boils down to excellent communication and coordination among everyone involved to ensure everyone understands their tasks, meets deadlines, and holds each other accountable.
Q: With so many moving parts, are there common issues that frequently arise during these projects from an SEO perspective?
A: There are some common threads.
While I wouldn’t say developers outright ask “why” they need to do something, if a company hires an SEO agency, they should trust our expertise. We are the SEO experts, so developers should implement our recommendations, assuming they align with the client’s business goals. Of course, if there are technical limitations, we’ll find alternative solutions.
I recall one extreme example:
We were working on a migration where the client updated their website’s layout. It instantly improved their click-through rate and reduced bounce rate.
However, due to their outdated server architecture, their staging site was indexable, and they couldn’t add a no-index tag without affecting the live site.
This was a surprising limitation, and fixing it would have required a complete reconstruction of their website, which wasn’t budgeted for. Sometimes, unexpected technical limitations can arise.
SEO has its own jargon that agency developers, even great ones, might not understand. We need to make things clearer. Just today, I had a project manager ask, “How do I change meta titles?”. We sometimes assume people know more about SEO basics than they do.
Q: Could you walk us through the typical lifecycle of a website migration?
A: While every project is different, we generally divide it into three main stages.
It’s important to remember that we don’t perform the migration ourselves, although we have had such projects in the past. Our developers don’t make direct changes.
The steps in the first stage are:
Analysis and recommendation: This involves analyzing the old site’s keyword rankings and traffic, identifying priority pages, and mapping the current URL structure. It’s also an opportunity to audit existing content, especially in light of recent Google algorithm updates that penalize low-quality content.
The next stage begins when the developers responsible for the migration implement a “code freeze” and move everything to the new staging site. At this point, we
Review the new staging site: This includes checking the new URL structure, internal links, content, meta tags, schema markup, crawl issues, 404 pages, and the sitemap.
The most crucial element here is the redirect map, ensuring all old URLs correctly redirect to their new counterparts. We also emphasize migrating schema markup, as AI models rely on it to understand content.
For example, we oversaw a migration from WordPress to Webflow where the schema markup wasn’t migrated at all, resulting in zero schema on the new site and reduced online visibility.
After we provide a list of recommendations, the developers implement them and notify us when they’re done. This leads to the
Pre-launch test phase. We conduct a final, thorough check to ensure everything is correct. If we give the green light, the website can launch. A golden rule:
Never launch on a Friday. If something breaks, no one will be available over the weekend to fix it.
Migration Launch Day
On launch day, it’s “all hands on deck” with the client, developers, us, and any other agencies involved. Once the site goes live, we immediately check if all redirects work and if the
The robots.txt file is accessible and allows crawling. We also verify canonical tags and ensure search engines can correctly index the site.
Q: Any advice on the most common mistakes in the final stage of migration?
The biggest potential for error, and it happens more often than you’d think, is when developers forget to remove the global no-index tag from the staging version before pushing the site live.
This signals to bots not to index the website, leading to a complete disappearance from Google search. So, beyond proper redirect maps and schema, always remember to remove that no-index tag.
Q: That sounds like a critical oversight. It almost seems like you need a pre-flight checklist for SEO before launching a website. If you were to create one, what would be on it?
A: The basic things I mentioned are crucial:
- redirect map, ensuring the no-index tag is removed,
- proper schema, and
- correct internal linking.
Also, check for placeholders like “lorem ipsum” content, which often gets forgotten. Other elements often missed during migration include FAQs, shortcodes, and featured images.
After the launch, we enter the final stage:
Checking if it truly worked. This involves monitoring how Google reacts, if new pages are being re-crawled and re-indexed, and what’s happening with keyword rankings. Clients need to be aware that there will be fluctuations in keyword rankings post-migration, which can last for weeks or even months.
Another crucial recommendation:
Never migrate during your business’s high season. I recently advised two clients to postpone their migrations for a few months because it was their high season, and a temporary dip in visibility could cost them their entire year’s earnings. It’s better to migrate during the off-season so the website is well-established by the next peak.
Finally, as we move into the AI era, we also need to consider how AI bots crawl websites and if we are visible to them.
Did you know that 30% of the world’s top websites block the ChatGPT bot from accessing their content to prevent content theft? AI bots are also more aggressive than Google Bot and consume a lot of server bandwidth.
You can add a simple line to your robots.txt to throttle these bots if your website experiences slowdowns due to their traffic. While we don’t regularly check for this, we can recommend it to clients if needed.
Q: How long does it usually take for a migration to be considered “officially over” and for traffic and SEO to stabilize after a migration?
A: It truly depends on the type of migration. If it’s just layout changes without URL structure modifications, it can stabilize quite quickly, perhaps in a week or two.
However, a complete restructuring of the website, content, and architecture can take two to three months to return to initial performance or improve.
If you’re changing to a completely new domain, it can take even longer, potentially years. I recall a client who changed domains due to an algorithmic devaluation; despite significant investment, it took six months for their new website to even appear in the top 10 rankings. So, while it’s typically weeks to a few months, individual situations can vary greatly.
Q: When you encounter a poorly executed migration, do you have to start from scratch, or can you surgically fix specific issues?
A: Usually, we analyze the flawed migration to identify the problems and then fix them within the new website, unless it’s so completely messed up that there’s no way out, which I don’t believe has ever happened.
There’s almost always a solution. The biggest challenge, however, is that clients often demand quick fixes, which are rarely possible in such complex situations.
My role as an experienced account manager is to be honest. I would never tell a client something is easy or possible if it isn’t.
For example, if a client comes to us after a botched migration during their high season and expects to be back at number one in a week, I would honestly tell them to forget about that season and focus on investing time and money for the next.
Q: Are clients or agencies increasingly asking about optimizing their website for AI during migration, or do they tend to lump it in with SEO?
A: They might try to lump it together, but it’s a different project.
Migration is about correctly transferring the website; SEO optimization, or AI optimization, is a separate service. Of course, a client can request both a migration and a strategy audit, but they would be treated as two separate projects.
For AI, the most important aspects are visibility, schema, and branding. Unlike Google search, to appear in large language models or AI overviews, you need to be a solid brand. It’s crucial to inform clients that SEO must work in synergy with other channels, especially branding.
Conclusion: Thank you for sharing your experience!
Artur Karpiński’s insights underscore a crucial truth: website migration is not merely a technical overhaul but a high-stakes SEO undertaking.
As search continues its evolution, particularly with the rise of AI-driven models that prioritize authoritative and well-structured content, neglecting SEO during a migration can lead to severe and long-lasting consequences, including significant traffic loss and diminished rankings.
SUSO’s approach, emphasizing meticulous planning, collaborative effort, and a deep understanding of potential pitfalls, serves as a vital blueprint for agencies.
By partnering with SEO experts, businesses can transform a risky transition into an opportunity to strengthen their online presence and ensure future growth in an increasingly competitive digital landscape.
