Moving a site without losing what it earned

What it is

A website migration is a planned move of a site that already exists: to a new platform, a new host, a new domain, or into new hands. The design work is the visible half. The half that decides whether it goes well is addresses, redirects, licences and access, and that half is done before anything is rebuilt.

A takeover is the same job with one extra problem: the person who built the site is no longer in the room. That changes nothing about the method and everything about the order, because a move cannot be planned around accounts nobody has confirmed they can still reach.

Who it is for

Four kinds of buyer arrive here. The first has outgrown a builder: a Wix or Squarespace site that did its job and cannot do what the business needs next. The second is relaunching, often with a new name or domain, and has worked out that a fresh start on a fresh address throws away everything the old one earned.

The third has inherited a site. An agency ended, a developer stopped answering, a colleague left, and nobody knows where the domain is registered or who pays the hosting. The fourth is replatforming for a reason that is not aesthetic: a licence that no longer makes sense, a host that has become slow, or a shop on the wrong system for how it now sells.

What they share is a site with history. If it has none, this is a build rather than a migration, and the rungs at websites are the ones to read.

What it costs

There is no fixed migration price on this ladder yet, so here is the honest version rather than an invented one. The audit has a real price. The rebuild is quoted from the same build rungs as every other client's, chosen by what the destination is. The audit turns those two facts into one number, and its fee is credited against the work.

USD is the anchor on every page, quote and invoice. The figure in parentheses is the same price in dirhams at the pegged rate of 3.6725 to the dollar, given as one local equivalent rather than a currency list, and correct as of 5 September 2026. Prices exclude any VAT, sales tax or withholding your own country applies to imported services.

Not losing the rankings

Search visibility is attached to addresses, not to designs. A site can be redrawn from the ground up and hold its position, and a site can keep its design exactly and lose everything. The difference is whether the old addresses still resolve.

So the redirect map is built first, from two sources, because neither is complete on its own. A crawl of the live site finds every page that is linked. Search Console finds the pages that earn impressions, including the ones nothing links to any more. Every address in the union of those lists gets a permanent redirect: one to one where a replacement exists, and to the nearest honest parent where it does not.

Then the launch, and then the fortnight most relaunches skip. For fourteen days after cutover the server log is read for the 404s the map missed, Search Console coverage is checked for pages dropping out of the index, and the sitemap and canonicals are watched to be sure they agree. That is the window in which a missed address is still cheap to fix.

When somebody else holds the keys

Nothing gets quoted until eight things are known. A takeover that begins with a rebuild and finds the access problem later has to stop halfway and ask you for money twice.

1. The domain. Who the registrant of record is, and who can change the nameservers today.
2. The hosting. Where the site is genuinely served from, and whether the account is billed in your name.
3. The platform admin. An owner-level login, not an editor account that cannot export.
4. The measurement. Ownership of the Search Console and analytics properties, where the history lives.
5. The code. Whether a repository exists, or the live server is the only copy anyone has.
6. The licences. Themes, plugins, fonts and stock images, and whose account they were bought on.
7. The content. Whether the copy and the photography were paid for and assigned, or borrowed.
8. The backup. A full copy of files and database, handed to you before a single thing is changed.

Where one cannot be recovered, the audit says so in writing and the plan works around it. Nobody is asked to misrepresent who they are, and no account is touched without the owner's word that it is theirs to give.

How it runs

1. You write the brief in a sentence. The card below takes it. What is needed is where the site is now and where you want it.
2. Read access, then the audit. The crawl, the eight checks, the index review and the redirect map, inside a week. You keep it either way.
3. A written quote, fixed, naming the rung the rebuild sits on, what is excluded, and what the audit found that moved the number.
4. The rebuild, in the open, on a staging address you can read as it goes, with the redirect map loaded before launch rather than after.
5. Cutover in the evening, the old site archived, the backup in your hands, the old hosting left paid for a month.
6. Fourteen days of watching, then handover: the files, the rights, Search Console, the passwords, and a written account of how it is built.

What it has proved

Two takeovers. The findings are audits run by this studio; the impression figures come from a Search Console export handed over on 28 August 2026. They show what happened after the work, which is not the same as proving the work caused it.

• ClearQuest Water. The audit found seven pages indexed and twenty-five money pages never crawled at all, and ten city pages whose structured data each declared a business that did not exist. The sitemap was cleaned and the canonicals rebuilt, and the Search Console series went from 15 impressions a day in late May 2026 to 507 a day in August 2026.
• Pink Salt. Eight months dormant when it was picked up, with a catalogue half off-niche, the tracking pixel never once firing, tax flags switched off on all but two variants, and compare-at prices that referred to nothing. All of it from an audit run with authenticated store access held across sessions.

There are no testimonials on this site and no star rating in its markup, because it has neither. The ClearQuest figures are one property's export; the Pink Salt findings are an audit rather than a result. Neither is a promise about your site.

Who it is not for

Questions people ask before they write

Sources

1. ClearQuest Water Search Console export, handed over 28 August 2026 (Chart.csv), alongside the pre-takeover audit run by this studio.
2. Pink Salt store audit, run by this studio with authenticated store access, 2026.
3. Pricing benchmarks, ShepherdUX research note 18, September 2026, drawing on published agency and freelance rate surveys.
4. United Arab Emirates dirham pegged at 3.6725 to the United States dollar, Central Bank of the UAE, rate as of 5 September 2026.