A website migration built for growth: The Good Roll story

Client

The Good Roll

Market

E-commerce

meet our Expert

Emma Smeulders

Team Lead SEO

A website migration built for growth: The Good Roll story

Executive summary

The Good Roll, a sustainable toilet-paper brand that funds sanitation projects with its profits, was moving to a new platform: a new CMS, a new server and a new URL structure, all at once. With more than 8,000 organic visitors a month, a rushed migration could have wiped out years of hard-won rankings overnight.

So we treated the move as a planned, staged process. We mapped what was at risk on the old site, built and tested the migration plan on a staging environment before go-live, and monitored rankings daily through the switch. The site came through the migration with its organic visibility protected, and it has kept climbing ever since.

Results

Organic clicks grew more than 60% year on year on the new platform.
Core terms climbed from page two onto page one, average position from around 18 into the top 10.
The full replatform went live with its organic visibility protected, a clean base to grow from.

Our approach

We ran the migration in three layers, the method behind every SEO migration we run: understand what is at risk, prepare and test before go-live, then migrate under close watch. The goal was simple: change everything under the hood while the market noticed nothing.

We ran a full analysis of the existing site, its content, technical setup and authority, to find what drove the organic traffic and what the change put at risk. A new CMS, server and URL structure each threatened something specific: the internal link structure, the crawlable page templates, and every ranking URL. We catalogued the top pages, the dead and orphaned pages worth redirecting, the internal linking and the backlink profile, so nothing valuable could slip through the cracks.

We turned the analysis into a detailed migration checklist and a full redirect plan, mapping every old URL to its new home with 301s, then tested it all on a staging environment set to no-index. We checked what a migration quietly breaks: hreflang and canonicals, XML sitemaps, breadcrumbs and schema, title and meta parity against the old pages, and internal links. The new architecture was tied to the topical map, so the rebuild came out at least as strong as what it replaced.

At cutover we handled the switch, the DNS update and the removal of the staging no-index, then watched the early warning signs: status codes (404s and 500s), indexation, crawl behavior and rankings, day by day. Catching an edge case within days, not weeks, is what keeps a migration controlled.