Summarize with AI
Moving a website from one platform to another is mostly a risk management job. The design work is the easy part. What can go wrong is your search traffic, and that damage is slow to appear and slow to undo.
That is why hiring a migration partner is a different decision from hiring a design agency. You are buying someone to protect what already works while the site moves. Here is how to tell who can actually do that.
A migration is not a redesign, and mixing them hides problems
Many studios will quote you a migration and quietly deliver a redesign. New layout, new copy, new structure, new platform, all at once. It looks like better value. It is not.
When everything changes together and traffic drops, nobody can tell you why. Was it the URLs, the new copy, the lost internal links, or the platform? You cannot fix what you cannot diagnose.
The safer sequence is to move the site first with the content and structure intact, confirm that rankings held, then redesign. A partner who suggests this without being asked understands the risk. One who bundles everything into a single exciting project may not have lived through the aftermath.
Ask how they handle redirects, and listen for specifics
This is the question that separates specialists from generalists. Every URL that changes needs a permanent redirect to its new address. Miss them and you lose the ranking and every link pointing at that page.
A specialist will talk about crawling the existing site to get a full URL list, mapping old to new one by one, handling the pages that no longer have an equivalent, and checking the map after launch rather than assuming it worked. They will mention pages you forgot about, like old campaign landing pages and PDFs.
A generalist will say redirects are handled. That is not an answer. Ask to see a redirect map from a previous migration. If they have done this properly before, one exists.
Find out who is responsible if traffic drops
Traffic usually dips for a few weeks after a migration while search engines recrawl. That is normal. What is not normal is a drop that does not recover.
Ask directly: if organic traffic is still down twelve weeks after launch, what happens? You want to hear that they will investigate and fix it, and you want to know whether that is included or billed. There is no standard answer here, but there should be an answer. Silence means the risk is entirely yours.
Ask them to record your current rankings and traffic before anything moves. Without a baseline, nobody can prove what happened either way.
Check they have moved sites like yours, not just sites
The platform pairing matters less than the shape of the site. A five page brochure site and a site with three hundred blog posts and a customer login are different jobs.
Ask how many pages the largest site they have moved had, and what broke. Ask what they did with the blog. If your site has a lot of published content earning search traffic, that content is the asset being moved, and it needs someone who treats it that way.
If you already know which platform you are moving to, our platform guides walk through the mechanics of each move, including WordPress to Webflow and Wix to Framer. Those cover doing it yourself. This page is about deciding who does it for you.
Compare it honestly against doing it in house
If your site is small, your content is thin, and nobody is finding you through search yet, a migration is not very risky. Doing it yourself is a reasonable choice and modern platforms are built for that.
The case for hiring changes when search traffic is a real channel for you, when you have hundreds of pages, or when nobody on the team has done a migration before and your calendar has no room for a bad month. You are paying to protect existing revenue, not to get a nicer site.
Work out roughly what your organic traffic is worth per month. If a bad migration would cost more than the quote, hiring is easy to justify. If it would not, it probably is not worth it.
What a good migration plan looks like
It starts with a full crawl and an inventory of every URL. It records current rankings and traffic as a baseline. It maps every old URL to a new one, including the ones being retired. It moves content and structure without redesigning them. It ships, then checks the redirect map, the sitemap, and the search console for errors in the first week. It watches rankings for a few weeks and fixes what moved.
If a proposal skips the inventory or the baseline, those are the two steps that make everything else checkable. Ask for them.
Where Studio Maydit fits
When we take on a move, the existing search traffic is the thing we are being paid to protect, so the inventory and the baseline happen before anything is touched. We also keep the move and the redesign as two separate pieces of work, for the diagnosis reason above.
We are a design studio working with AI and software companies across the US, UK, and Europe, building in Framer, Webflow, and custom code.
If a move is on your roadmap and you want a straight read on whether it needs outside help, book a free 30-minute call. Plenty of sites are small enough to move in house, and we will say so when yours is one of them.
