Engineering team
Web practice
The problem nobody flags in scoping
A WordPress-to-Next.js replatform looks like a content migration problem. It mostly is. But the part that kills SEO is the redirect map — the 1:1 mapping from old URL to new URL that keeps Google's understanding of the site intact across the cutover.
A regex and a wildcard redirect look finished in staging. Then traffic sags in week two and nobody knows why.
Categories we check first
Some URL patterns are higher risk than others. We sort the existing site's URLs into categories and review the redirect rule for each category before we cut over.
- Permalink structure changes — /2024/03/post-slug → /blog/post-slug needs explicit rules, not regex.
- Category and tag pages — these accumulate a lot of internal link equity; missing one quietly tanks rankings.
- Pagination URLs — /blog/page/3 needs a target, even if you canonicalized them away.
- Author pages, archive pages, search pages — easy to forget; often have backlinks.
- Trailing-slash inconsistencies — /about and /about/ are different URLs to Google.
The post-launch monitoring
Cutover day, we set up daily Search Console crawl-error monitoring and alert on 404 spikes. We also keep the old WordPress install running on a subdomain for two weeks as a fallback — if a critical page slips through the redirect map, we can route to it from the new site while we patch.
Expect a short dip while Google recrawls the new URLs. Agree a recovery window before cutover. Agree the rollback trigger too — a dip that deepens instead of closing means the redirect map needs another pass.