A website migration with zero ranking loss
A full platform migration threatened years of accumulated search equity. We ran a 42-task migration protocol — full redirect mapping, canonical hygiene and Core Web Vitals hardening.
The challenge
The hospital was moving its website to new hosting and a new platform. Years of accumulated search visibility on department and treatment pages were at risk — a botched migration can erase rankings that took years to build, and recovery is slow and uncertain.
What we did
- Full crawl and inventory of every indexed URL before anything moved, with priority ranking by search value.
- Complete redirect map from old URLs to new, covering every indexed page rather than just the main navigation.
- Canonical tag and duplicate content hygiene across the new build.
- Core Web Vitals hardening on the new platform before launch rather than after.
- Post-migration monitoring on a daily cadence for the first weeks, with a rollback plan held ready.
The result
Figures are drawn from client reporting over the engagement period and rounded for confidentiality. Results depend on catchment, specialty mix, capacity and competition, and are not a prediction for any other hospital.
What we learned
Migrations fail on the long tail, not the homepage. The pages that get forgotten are old treatment and doctor pages that still rank and still bring enquiries — which is why the inventory step matters more than the launch itself.