Most SEO disasters aren’t caused by algorithm updates — they’re caused by migrations done casually. Done properly, you can migrate a website to WordPress from Wix, Squarespace, Typo3 or a custom CMS with rankings intact and usually improving within a quarter. The process is unglamorous and it works.
Before anything moves
- Full URL inventory: crawl the live site (Screaming Frog), export Search Console’s top pages, and note which URLs actually earn traffic and links.
- Benchmark: record current rankings, traffic and Core Web Vitals. You can’t defend what you didn’t measure.
- Content parity plan: every valuable page gets a destination; every destination keeps (or improves) title, heading structure and body content.
The migration itself
- Build on staging with search engines blocked — but with final URLs decided.
- Map every old URL to its new home. One-to-one where possible; to the closest relevant page (never blanket-to-homepage) where not.
- Implement 301 redirects server-side — the single most important artefact of the entire project.
- Preserve metadata: titles, descriptions, canonical logic, schema. Rebuild XML sitemaps.
- Match or beat performance — a migration that slows the site down is a ranking donation to competitors.
Launch week
Switch DNS at a quiet hour, submit the new sitemap, then watch Search Console’s coverage and 404 reports daily. Fix crawl errors within hours, not weeks. Expect a small wobble for two to four weeks; a properly-redirected migration recovers, and sites moving off slow builders (Wix especially) typically end up ahead on speed alone.
The Typo3/legacy special case
Legacy CMS migrations (Typo3, old bespoke systems) add content-extraction work — often thousands of records needing scripted export and cleanup. It’s exactly the kind of project that goes white-label: one of my longest-standing agency clients came from a complete Typo3-to-WordPress conversion their client still runs today.
Planning a migration? Book a call — I’ll quote it fixed, redirects and all.
