SEO-Safe Migration
Off legacy PHP, without losing the search traffic your business runs on.
For CTOs and founders of teams with roughly 5–30 engineers whose site earns its traffic from search.
The problem
The legacy stack works, but every change takes longer than it should and hiring for it is getting harder. A rewrite sounds tempting, but a big-bang rewrite freezes features for months, and a failed launch can wipe out years of rankings overnight.
What happens
I move you section by section. The new stack serves one part of the site at a time, behind redirects, while the old one keeps serving the rest. Every step can be rolled back.
Step 1: Migration Map
About 2 weeks, fixed price. An inventory of every URL, template and integration, a redirect plan, the cut-over order and a risk list. It’s yours to keep, even if we stop there.
Guarantee: if the Map doesn’t give you a cut-over plan you’d follow, you don’t pay. It’s credited in full if we do the cut-over together within 30 days.
Step 2: Cut-over
Usually within the first 3 weeks of the cut-over, the routing layer is in production and one low-traffic page is served by the new stack. Nothing changes for your users yet, but the path is proven. The first full section follows within 8 weeks, often sooner. The Map sets both dates for your project, since they depend on your infrastructure and release process. That first section is usually a smaller, lower-risk one that the Map picks out, and the rest follows section by section.
- Server-side rendering and a redirect for every old URL.
- Several releases a week, so your roadmap doesn’t stop.
- Code-first API contracts, and every database change shipped as a versioned migration.
- Search Console and server logs watched daily while each section goes live, so problems are fixed in hours, not discovered a quarter later.
Proof
I led this exact kind of migration for InYourPocket, a 100+ city travel guide: around 100,000 URLs and 8 million monthly search impressions moved from Symfony to Next.js, with search rankings up after launch.
Cut-over guarantee
Every old URL in the Migration Map gets a working, direct redirect. If any of them ends up as a 404 or a redirect chain, I fix it at no extra cost, with no time limit, as long as nobody else has changed the redirects or routing since. If a section shows a real problem after go-live, I roll it back first and fix it after.
Case study
- 100kURLs migrated, search rankings up after launch
Moving a 100+ city travel guide from Symfony to Next.js without losing search traffic
Questions
- Why not a big-bang rewrite?
- Because every mistake goes live on the same day. Section by section, each one can be rolled back.
- Which stacks do you work with?
- On the legacy side mostly PHP (Symfony, Laravel, Drupal) and older Node.js. On the new side TypeScript with Next.js and NestJS, or Python with Django.
- What do you need from us?
- Access to Search Console, server logs and the repo, and someone who knows the old integrations.
- Do you work with our SEO agency?
- Yes. They own content and keywords, I own URLs, redirects and rendering, and they get a copy of the Map.
- Do you work alone or with our team?
- With your team. Either as a fixed-scope project, or as a longer fractional engagement where I lead the migration.
Start with the Migration Map
Book a free 30-minute call: tell me what you're moving off, and we'll see whether the Map is the right first step. Based in Slovenia. Remote-first, working in EU time zones (CET). On-site visits by arrangement.