The challenge
The site had eight years of accumulated search equity and ranked well for competitive professional-services terms in its region, but Wix had become a ceiling — no server access, limited control over markup and structured data, and no way to build the case-study and resource templates the client needed. The risk was obvious and the client had heard the horror stories: migrations that lose half their traffic overnight and never recover. Wix's URL structure also didn't map cleanly onto a sensible WordPress permalink scheme, so a naive move would have broken most inbound links.
Captured before any work began: 312 indexed URLs, 47 tracked keyword positions, 1,180 referring domains pointing at 63 distinct landing pages, and a full crawl export with traffic and backlink data per URL so the highest-value pages could be prioritised.
The approach
Migrations lose rankings for one reason, and it isn't the platform — URLs change and nobody maps them properly. I spend more time on the redirect map than on the rebuild itself, and I plan the whole project backwards from it.
The results
The cutover completed inside four minutes with no interruption to visitors, and the redirect map held — no unresolved 404s in Search Console at the 30-day mark. Tracked rankings dipped slightly in week two, which is normal as Google reprocesses redirects, and had recovered by week five. The client gained full ownership of their site along with the template flexibility Wix couldn't offer.
What this didn't cover
Design was matched, not improved — this was a platform migration and any redesign was deliberately kept out of scope so that ranking changes could be attributed cleanly. No content rewriting and no new page templates beyond what already existed. Email hosting stayed with the previous provider. Wix's native booking widget had no direct WordPress equivalent and was replaced with a third-party plugin the client now pays for separately, which is a real ongoing cost worth stating. I'd also be honest that a small ranking dip during reprocessing is normal and largely outside anyone's control — the goal is recovery, not avoiding the dip entirely.
Services used on this project
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