Clinical practice: WordPress to Netlify, with search intact

A clinical practice moved its website from WordPress on managed hosting to a new Next.js build on Netlify. The developer built the new site; my job was continuity: making sure search engines and visitors could follow the move, and investigating what went wrong afterward.

My role

Technical SEO, migration oversight, and investigation, in coordination with the practice and its developer.

What I did

Redirect decisions for every URL

I examined the legacy URLs and reconciled the redirect map, deciding for each URL whether it should pass through unchanged, inherit an existing destination, receive a migration redirect, or be treated as intentionally removed. I separated problems the migration caused from older issues the site already had, so neither got blamed on the other.

Repository analysis with Claude Code

I combined crawls and exports with a read-only, AI-assisted analysis of the Next.js repository. It found thousands of references to images still hosted on the old WordPress site, and the handful of central files responsible, which became a developer-ready plan for moving the media. The analysis changed no code.

A conservative disavow

I reviewed the backlink profile and prepared a replacement disavow file that removed genuinely toxic domains while keeping legitimate ones, because disavowing good links does real harm.

After launch

I investigated blurry images from the image CDN, JavaScript and CSS problems, site instability, and analytics behavior with the client and developer, and worked on sequencing, DNS review, and launch verification.

Reading the data honestly

When engagement fell in a short GA4 window, the easy story was that the blurry images were driving people away. I treated tracking, engagement, and site defects as three separate questions, each needing its own evidence, and didn't let a few days of data stand in for proof.

Status

Migration oversight and post-launch investigation delivered; further work under discussion. See website migrations.

Updated October 5, 2026