Old websites often contain years of useful content. Careless migration loses pages that bring traffic and enquiries.
Step 1: inventory
List every URL, its traffic (from Analytics) and links (from Search Console).
Step 2: decide for each page
- Keep: valuable, accurate content.
- Update: useful but outdated.
- Merge: several thin pages into one.
- Remove: irrelevant or obsolete, with a redirect to the closest page.
Step 3: clean content
- Remove old formatting and broken links.
- Replace outdated names and details in bulk with our find and replace tool.
- Re-optimise titles and descriptions.
Step 4: redirects
Map every changed URL to its new location; generate rules with our redirect generator.
Step 5: check after launch
Crawl the new site, watch Search Console and fix 404s.
Read redesigning without losing rankings.
Want the full picture? This article is part of Business websites: the complete guide, our in-depth guide with everything in one place.
