The one-month site migration for Dogs Trust

How we delivered a successful migration on a very tight timeline

We were engaged to assist with the migration of the Dogs Trust Ireland website to a new platform and design. The main challenge was the tight timeline, with the site scheduled to launch just a month after the project's start. Content would continue to be added up until launch day, leaving us with a limited window to fully evaluate the site. The new site was expected to share a similar codebase with its UK counterpart, which presented both opportunities and challenges. While it allowed for the inheritance of relevant content, it also meant any existing technical issues and processes from the UK site would carry over. Additionally, there was a goal to consolidate or remove a significant amount of existing content.

What we did

Technical SEO

Site Migration

The results

We very quickly saw an uplift in traffic and revenue following these changes:

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Increase in visibility

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YoY increase in non-brand organic visits

Our approach

Given the circumstances, we took a pragmatic approach; prioritising specific tasks over the full scope of a typical SEO migration process. Our primary focus was on content auditing.

The client team identified which pages could be inherited from the UK site and which content would be removed or consolidated. We collaborated with them to provide recommendations on additional pages to retain, based on existing performance and search opportunities, while also advising on the proposed information architecture (IA).

Since we already had a solid understanding of the technical health of the UK site, we concentrated on two critical tasks: scoping and implementing hreflang tags to prevent issues with duplicate content, and managing essential redirects. Given the shared content between the UK and Ireland sites, we were mindful to avoid content overlap or potential cannibalisation. We manually mapped these elements for both the IE and UK sites to ensure a seamless launch.

Redirects were a top priority, as they are crucial to the success of any migration and vital for preserving link equity. If there’s one task you can’t skip, it’s this! We reviewed and reconfigured legacy redirects, addressed existing 404 errors, created wildcard rules, and mapped all URLs from the IR site to their UK counterparts.

Post-migration

Upon completing the migration tasks, we conducted both pre- and post-launch checks to identify and recommend any urgent fixes before giving the green light for launch. These checks also highlighted lower-priority “phase two” improvements to be addressed after the migration.

As we filled content gaps, we anticipated increased visibility for additional search terms, particularly around dog breeds. However, our primary objective remained minimising ranking fluctuations and protecting the site’s established core rankings.

The impact

We were thrilled that the migration surpassed all expectations! Not only were the core drivers of existing traffic sustained (and even slightly improved), but we also saw a substantial increase in new keyword rankings for the site.

Additionally, the UK development fixes that were implemented to tackle technical SEO challenges were successfully applied to the Ireland site, further strengthening its performance.