Synetix SystemsWebsite migration
Move off the builder. Keep what search already gives you.
You are paying monthly for a site you did not want and cannot change. The only thing keeping you there is the worry that moving costs you your place in search. That worry is correct — and it is a solvable engineering problem, not a reason to stay.
Migrations do not lose rankings. Four specific mistakes do.
Every horror story about a rebuild tanking a business’s traffic comes down to one of these, and usually the first two. None of them are mysterious, and none of them are unavoidable.
01
The URLs change
Builders invent their own paths. Move platform without mapping them and every address search has indexed returns a 404. This is the one that actually costs rankings, and it is entirely preventable.
02
Nobody writes the redirects
A 301 tells search engines the page moved and hands the old page’s standing to the new one. Skipped, or done as a batch redirect to the homepage, and that standing is simply discarded.
03
The content gets “improved”
A rebuild is a tempting moment to rewrite everything. But the pages that rank do so because of the words on them. Rewrite first and you cannot tell whether a drop came from the move or the copy.
04
The new site is slower than the old one
Plenty of migrations move a slow builder site onto a slow custom theme. If the rebuild does not actually load faster, you paid to move sideways.
How the move runs
Your current site stays live until the day it does not
Nothing switches while the new site is being built. There is no window where you have two half-finished websites, and no day where customers find nothing.
- Crawl what you have
- Before anything is built we take a full inventory of your live site: every URL, every title and meta description, and which pages actually bring in traffic. That inventory is the contract for the rest of the move.
- Rebuild on the same addresses
- Where a URL can be kept, it is kept. The new site is designed around your existing structure rather than the other way round, so most of the old map still resolves without a redirect at all.
- Map every URL that has to change
- What cannot be kept gets a 301 to its closest equivalent, written page by page. Not a blanket redirect to the homepage, which search engines treat as a soft 404 and ignore.
- Move the content as written
- The words that rank come across as they are. We change design, speed and structure on the way over, and leave the copy alone until the move has settled — so if anything shifts, the cause is obvious.
- Cut over on a named day
- We point the domain, submit the new sitemap, and confirm the redirect map resolves end to end. You keep the domain throughout — it is yours, and it never moves into an account you do not control.
- Watch it for a month
- Search Console and analytics get checked against the pre-move inventory. If a page that used to bring traffic stops, we find out from the data rather than from you.
What we will not promise
That no ranking will ever move. Nobody operates the search engine, and a position can shift in any given month for reasons that have nothing to do with your site. What is controllable is whether your URLs survive, whether every redirect is written, whether the content that earned those rankings comes across intact, and whether the new site is genuinely faster. Those are the four things that sink a migration, and those are the four we handle.
Questions
- Will I lose my search rankings if I move my website?
- Rankings are lost in a migration when URLs change and nothing redirects, when the content that ranked is rewritten at the same time, or when the new site is slower than the old one. All three are preventable and all three are what the process above is built around. What nobody can promise is that a search engine will not move a ranking for its own reasons in the same month — anyone guaranteeing zero change is guaranteeing something they do not control.
- How do I move my website off Wix or Squarespace?
- The site is rebuilt elsewhere, the old URL structure is preserved or redirected page by page, and then the domain is pointed at the new host. The rebuild happens before anything switches, so your current site stays live and unchanged the whole time. The only moment anything changes for a visitor is the cutover itself.
- Do I lose my domain name?
- No. The domain is yours and stays in your name throughout. If your builder currently holds it, we help you move it to a registrar you control, which is worth doing regardless of who builds your site. If you later leave us, we hand the site over and point the domain wherever you want it.
- What does it cost to migrate a website?
- Nothing up front. The rebuild and the migration are included in the design, which is free, and you pay $49 a month afterward for hosting, edits, security and local SEO upkeep. The minimum term is 6 months, which is what pays for the build.
- How long does a website migration take?
- You get a go-live date on the first call and we build to it. The length depends on how many pages exist and how tangled the current URL structure is, which is exactly what the initial crawl is for — we scope it before naming the date, rather than naming a date and discovering the scope afterward.
- Can you move my content over, or do I have to rewrite it?
- We move it as written. Rewriting during a migration is the most common self-inflicted ranking loss, because it changes two variables at once. Once the move has settled and the numbers look right, improving the copy is a good idea — just not on the same day.
Send us the site you have now
We will crawl it and tell you what the move actually involves: how many URLs, how many need redirecting, and what is holding the current site back. Nothing up front, then $49 a month.
Not a range, and not “a few weeks”. We scope the site with you on the first call, name the day it goes live, and hold it. If anything moves that date, you hear it from us before it happens, not after.