Thank you
We have it. Next comes a plan, not an invoice.
We come back with what moves, what gets rebuilt, what it costs and how long the site is unavailable, which is usually minutes rather than days.
What moves
What comes across, and what has to be rebuilt
The pages are the easy part. What people lose in a move is everything in this list after the first line.
- Every page and post, with its text and images
- A redirect from each old address to its new one, so the rankings you have now survive the move
- Titles, descriptions and the markup that search engines read
- Forms, and wherever their submissions were going before
- Store products, past orders and customer accounts
- Email on your domain, if that is moving too, with the old mail intact
How it goes
How a move runs
The site you have now stays up the whole time.
- We copy the site and build the new one beside it. Nothing about the live site changes yet.
- You look at the copy and tell us what is wrong, while nothing is at stake.
- We map every old address to a new one and test the redirects before anyone sees them.
- The switch happens at a quiet hour for your traffic. Usually minutes of downtime.
Questions
The ones people ask before they fill this in
Will I lose my Google rankings?
Not if the redirects are done properly, which is most of the work and the part people skip. Positions often move for a week or two while Google recrawls, then settle. A move that costs you your rankings is a move done badly, so we treat that as our problem rather than a risk we warned you about.
Which platform should I move to?
Depends on who updates the site and how often. If you want to edit it yourself, that points one way. If it needs to talk to your other systems, it points somewhere else. Leave that field blank on the form and we will recommend one with the reasons.
How long does it take?
A small site is usually a week. A store with years of orders takes longer, because the order history and the customer accounts have to be checked rather than assumed. You get a date with the quote.
Can you move our email as well?
Yes, and it is worth doing at the same time. Email on a domain breaks when the domain records change and nobody planned for it, which is how a business ends up losing a day of enquiries during a website move.
What does it cost?
Quoted per site, because a five page brochure and a thousand product store are not the same job. Fill the form in and you get a number and a date back rather than a price range.