Moving an old website to a new platform without losing data

When it is time to move

• The platform is outdated: no updates, modules break, the host still requires an old PHP version.
• Every small edit needs a developer, because the admin panel simply has no such option.
• The site is slow and cannot be sped up any further on this platform.
• The shop has outgrown its website builder: you need your own filters, integrations, exports, automatic price imports.
• The developers of the previous system are nowhere to be found, and the accesses are with people you no longer work with.

What moves to the new platform

If some data is technically unavailable — for example the old system does not expose payment history — we say so before the start, not after the migration.

How the rankings are preserved

Rankings are not lost because of the move itself, but because of details that are easy to miss: addresses changed without redirects, meta tags did not travel, pages were closed in robots "during the works" and stayed closed, filters started producing duplicates.

Our order is simple: first we take a full map of the old site — every address, meta tag, heading and position on the day of the move. That is the reference. After launch we compare the new site against it page by page: anything that disappeared or changed address gets a 301. For the first two weeks we watch Search Console and rankings — a drop is visible immediately, not a month later from the client.

The order of work and timelines

• Audit of the old site (free, 3–5 days). What is inside, how many products and pages, which data can actually be extracted, what is not worth moving. The output is a plan and a price.
• New platform on a staging environment. We build the site while the old one keeps running. Weekly demos.
• Data migration. A trial run on a copy first, then a count check: there were 4,312 products — there are 4,312 products. Not "about the same".
• Redirects and verification. Address map, 301s, meta tags, sitemap, speed, forms and payments.
• Switch-over. In the lowest-traffic window. The old environment stays alive for several days — rollback takes a minute.
• Two weeks of monitoring. Search Console, rankings, 404s, incoming requests. Small leftovers are fixed without separate invoices.

Typical timelines: a brochure or corporate site — 2–4 weeks including the data move; a shop with thousands of products and integrations — from 5 weeks.

What the migration costs

The price has two parts: the new platform at the standard list price and the data migration, whose scope only becomes clear after the audit — 200 products and 20,000 products with a dozen integrations are different jobs. That is why we do not quote blindly: first we look at the site, then we give a fixed figure.

Need a move to another server without changing the engine? That is server setup — from €50.

What usually goes wrong elsewhere

• They move the "website", not the data. The catalogue is retyped by hand while orders and customers stay in the old database — and vanish with it six months later.
• They forget the redirects. The new platform produced different addresses, the old ones return 404 — and rankings and backlinks go with them.
• They leave noindex on after testing. A classic: the site stays closed to search for a month, and then "strange, why did traffic drop".
• They do not check the counts. "Almost everything" was migrated — and nobody noticed 300 cards without photos and 40 empty categories.
• They switch over and walk away. The first two weeks matter most: that is when 404s, duplicates and indexing problems surface.

We verify the result against a reference, not by eye: an HTTP 200 does not yet mean the page is intact.

Questions and answers

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