Platform migration and takeover
A successful migration is invisible. Visitors notice nothing, addresses keep answering, and search rankings do not move. All the work exists precisely for that.
What usually breaks
Three things sink migrations. Addresses change without redirects, and years of accumulated search equity disappear in weeks. Data is transferred partially, and nobody notices before the first customer complaint. The switchover happens in one night, with no way back.
We treat those three as deliverables in their own right, with a written inventory before anything is touched.
- Complete inventory of existing addresses, including forgotten ones
- Permanent redirect plan, tested before the switch
- Data transfer checked by counting and by sampling
- Parallel running through the transition period
- A way back at every stage
Preserving search rankings
An address already online must neither vanish nor change meaning. Every page of the old site gets a destination on the new one, by permanent redirect, and pages with no equivalent are handled explicitly rather than dumped onto the home page.
We measure before and after: positions, indexed pages, crawl errors. A migration is judged on those numbers three months later, not on the absence of complaints the next day.
- Page to page mapping, by permanent redirect
- Explicit handling of pages with no equivalent
- Language alternate tags carried over correctly
- Before and after measurement on positions and indexing
Taking over a platform nobody looks after
Some requests are not migrations but takeovers: a provider that shut down, a developer who left, code nobody understands any more. We start with a reading and documentation phase, changing nothing, to establish what actually runs and what can be switched off.
- Audit of the existing system before any change
- Operating documentation reconstructed and handed over
- Deployment chain and backups brought back into working order
- Gradual takeover, without a rewrite chosen for comfort
Platform migration and takeover
Do we have to rewrite everything to change host?
Almost never. A rewrite is sometimes justified, but it is too often proposed because starting over is more comfortable than reading existing code. We begin with the audit, and tell you what a rewrite would really cost before recommending one.
How long is the site unavailable?
The propagation time of a domain change, a few minutes in practice, because the new foundation is already running and was validated before the switch. A migration that requires hours of downtime is a migration that was not prepared.
Can you migrate from WordPress, PrestaShop or Shopify?
Yes, those are the cases we see most. Each has its own traps, particularly around product variants, media and historical addresses, and we cover them in the initial inventory.
Infrastructure and operations
Servers, zero-downtime deployments, verified backups and continuous monitoring.
In the division Infrastructure and operations
Let us talk about what you want to build.
Describe your situation in a few lines. If it falls outside what we do well, we will say so immediately.
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