How Luminary protects SEO performance during website migrations

When a website migration goes wrong, it rarely announces itself at launch. The damage shows up weeks later, when search visibility has quietly collapsed and the window to recover has already closed. For brands with high-stakes trading periods, that timing can be devastating.

Shayna Burns

16 September 2026

4 minute read

Recently, news broke that Australian chef, Maggie Beer, completed a website migration to Shopify that resulted in a 38% drop in organic traffic. The migration had been deliberately scheduled mid-year to land safely before Christmas - the most critical trading period for a food and gifting brand. It was meant to be the cautious choice, but the site couldn't recover its search visibility in time, and even $800,000 in advertising spend couldn't make up for the lost sales.

It is a cautionary tale, and not a rare one. Website migrations are among the highest-risk events in a brand's digital life. They touch everything search engines use to understand and rank your site: URLs, site architecture, internal linking, metadata, page rendering, content hierarchy.

Done well, a migration can actually lift your website’s discoverability. Done without the right guardrails, it can wipe out years of accumulated SEO value - often at the worst possible moment. We wrote about SEO risks during website migrations back in 2022, and the risks we identified still commonly arise today.

At Luminary, to help our clients mitigate these risks, we take a deliberately cross-functional approach to migrations, with SEO embedded from the earliest stages of a project. Here is how that works in practice.

6 ways Luminary uses a cross-functional digital team to mitigate SEO risks during migrations

1. SEO research and inputs start early

SEO/GEO audits and research occur early in our Explore phase of our Explore Build Grow framework, so we can identify the pages and keywords we must hold onto to help brands retain traffic, as well as identify content gaps that can help them gain visibility. This feeds nicely into the content migration plan, which UX uses to guide information architecture (IA) planning. Further, it's not just about what pages we include for go-live, but also how they interconnect to facilitate crawling/indexation and machine understanding around entity connections and hierarchy. 

2. We allow time for cross-functional oversight

Content, UX, design and development teams need time to review SEO recommendations and must-have requirements to incorporate them into their plans. Similarly, SEO and Content teams need time to review and sign off on wireframes, component designs and the new IA.

Being across each other’s work ensures no strategy goes unconsidered. It also allows us to identify performance risks early.

One example of a high-risk deliverable is a dramatically different IA. If brands insist on decommissioning valuable pages that are currently driving traffic (or have the potential to with better SEO/GEO), we can identify this risk and flag it early with the expected traffic loss. This allows brands to make an informed decision about whether to go ahead with content removals and consolidation, so stakeholders are fully aware of what their traffic outlook will be post-migration.

3. SEO metadata and alt text is migrated - and ideally improved upon

One of the bigger migration risks we've seen is SEO metadata and image alt text rushed or not done at all through migration. Often, the page will appear the same, but custom optimised SEO tags are stripped. This can have a dramatic impact on rankings and visibility. To overcome this, we make a point of defining the expectations and roles/responsibilities around SEO tag migration clearly during planning.

4. Developers and SEO Specialists are constantly improving the definition of ‘best practice’ for Build

At Luminary, we are actively improving how we build websites as we learn more about what AI models respond well to. One notable tactic our back-end developers (BEDs) and front-end developers (FEDs) are improving is how content renders in the HTML to maximise the chance of search engines and AI models being able to read everything on the page. Reinforcing this, before anything goes live, there should be SEO checks and sign off.

5. URL redirect mapping is SEO-led

SEO should be responsible for page-to-page URL redirect mapping to ensure legacy URLs and former pages with SEO value (such as those identified through a backlink audit) are redirected to appropriate new pages. We put care into ensuring SEO equity is distributed to different levels of the website, not only top-level pages. Additionally, SEO teams should be also responsible for customising canonical tags, as needed, to handle duplicate content risks.

6. We review post-launch performance as a team

Three months after a website goes live, the Luminary team typically conducts a cross-functional post-launch website review. During this report, we look at how the migration impacted performance, make actionable recommendations for improvement and reprioritise the post-launch backlog. This ensures any performance risks are caught early and proactively. 

Maggie Beer's story isn't a Shopify story or an agency story. It's a story about what can happen when SEO is treated in a silo or as a post-launch concern rather than a foundational input. Traffic loss doesn’t happen at go live - it happens because the groundwork wasn't laid months before.

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