A migration order that avoids the classic failures: broken email, expired certificates, lost search rankings and a site that is down for a day.
·5 min read
Website migrations have a reputation for going badly, and it is deserved, but
the failures are predictable. Almost all of them come from doing the steps in
the wrong order, and specifically from changing DNS before everything is ready
to receive traffic.
Here is an order that works, and the four things that go wrong when it is not
followed.
The four classic failures
Email breaks. By a wide margin the most common and the most damaging. The
site and the mail often share a domain, someone points the domain at the new
host, and the MX records go with it. The website is fine and nobody can receive
an order for two days.
The certificate is not ready. DNS switches, traffic arrives, and the new host
has not issued a certificate yet because it could not validate the domain until
the DNS pointed at it. Visitors get a browser warning, which is worse than a
plain outage because it looks like a compromise.
URLs change and nobody redirects them. Every page that ranked now returns a
404. Recovery takes months and some of it never comes back.
A proxy sits in front doing the wrong thing. A CDN in front of a host that
also terminates TLS, configured in a mode that encrypts the visitor’s half and
not the origin half. The padlock appears, the connection is not actually secure
end to end, and it is easy to leave that way for years without noticing.
The order that avoids them
1. Inventory what the domain does. Before touching anything, write down every
DNS record and what depends on it. Mail, the site, any subdomain, verification
records for third party services. Migrations break things nobody remembered were
there.
2. Build the new site and reach it without DNS. Every serious host gives you
a temporary address. Get the site fully working there, including forms and
anything server-side. Nothing about this step is visible to the public, which is
the point.
3. Crawl the old site and keep the URL list. Every page, with its status
code. This is your redirect map and your verification list later, and it takes
minutes with a crawler.
4. Map old URLs to new ones. Every URL that changes gets a permanent
redirect to its closest equivalent. Redirect to the specific page, not to the
home page, which search engines treat as a soft 404 and which annoys people.
5. Lower the DNS time-to-live first. A day before the switch, drop the TTL on
the records you are changing to five minutes. This is the step that makes the
cutover reversible in minutes rather than a day, and it is the one most often
skipped.
6. Copy the mail records exactly. MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC, verified as
correct on the new DNS before the switch, not after. Those records are covered
in business email that lands in the
inbox.
7. Switch, then watch. Change the records. Check the site, check the
certificate, send a test email to an outside address and confirm it arrives.
8. Keep the old host running for a fortnight. It costs one more month of
hosting and it means a mistake is a five minute rollback rather than a rebuild.
After the switch
The work is not finished when the site loads.
Re-crawl and compare against the list from step three. Every URL should
return 200 or redirect once. A redirect chain of three hops is a slow page and
a diluted signal.
Submit the new sitemap in Search Console and watch the coverage report for
a fortnight. Errors show up there before they show up in traffic.
Check the certificate covers every hostname, including the www variant and
any subdomain. A certificate that covers the apex and not www is a common and
very visible mistake.
Confirm one canonical hostname. Pick www or the bare domain, permanently
redirect the other, and make sure the site does not serve identical content on
both.
Watch analytics against the same period last month, not against last week.
Weekly comparisons on a small site are noise.
The traffic dip question
A well-executed migration where URLs do not change should produce no meaningful
dip. If URLs do change, expect a couple of weeks of turbulence while redirects
are followed and re-indexed, then recovery.
A dip that persists past six weeks is not the migration settling, it is
something broken. Usually a redirect loop, a robots file copied from staging
with a blanket disallow, or a noindex tag that came along from the development
environment. All three are quick to find if you go looking and invisible if you
do not. Staging environments leaking a noindex into production is common
enough to be worth checking first, every time.
When to do it
Not on a Friday. Not before a holiday. Early in a week, in the morning, with the
person who can revert available for the rest of the day. This is unglamorous
advice and it is the difference between a small problem and a weekend.
One email when something new goes up, roughly twice a month. Plain
writing on what software costs and what is worth building. No sequences,
no sales calls, and one click to leave.
Tell us what the problem is. You will get an honest read on whether it is worth building, what it would take, and roughly what it would cost. No pitch deck, no pressure.
Six things: marketing websites, web applications, internal tools, AI systems, AI agents and MCP servers, and database work. Most projects touch two or three of them rather than sitting neatly in one.
Yes. Marketing sites, landing pages and content platforms, built on modern static tooling rather than page builders. They load in under a second and have the technical SEO groundwork done properly.
Yes. Customer portals, dashboards, booking systems and SaaS products. The kind where users log in, data persists and money changes hands, so it has to be right.
Software your staff use rather than your customers. A dashboard pulling numbers from systems that do not talk to each other, a job tracker matching how you actually work, or a scheduled job replacing a report someone assembles by hand every Monday.
Yes, and we will tell you when it is the wrong tool. Retrieval over your own documents, support assistants, document extraction and classification, all built with evaluation and guardrails from the start.
MCP is the standard that lets AI assistants reach your real systems instead of guessing. We build MCP servers that expose your data and tools to Claude and other clients, and agents that carry out multi-step work with permissions and audit trails.
Yes. Schema design, query performance work, migrations between systems, ETL pipelines and reporting layers. Usually called in when the database has quietly become the bottleneck, or the risk.
Not native iOS or Android apps. We build web applications that work properly on phones, which covers most of what businesses actually need. If you need a true native app, we will say so rather than talk you into a compromise.
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We design and build the sites and applications we make. We do not do standalone brand identity, logo design or print work. If you already have brand guidelines we will follow them.
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Often, yes. The first step is a short paid audit of the existing code and infrastructure, so you get an honest assessment of what is salvageable and what it would cost either way before committing to anything.
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Yes, if you want it. You can also take the project and run it yourself using the documentation provided. Both are genuine options and there is no pressure toward a retainer you do not need.
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A marketing site typically lands between $3,000 and $12,000 depending on page count and complexity. You get a written fixed price before any work begins, so the number you approve is the number you pay.
Applications and internal tools are scoped individually and most start around $15,000. Once users log in and data persists, you are buying software rather than a website, and it is priced like software.
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A single automation or integration is usually $2,000 to $6,000. A proper internal application with its own database and user roles runs $6,000 to $20,000. Anything your operations depend on goes up from there.
Fixed price wherever the scope can be fixed. That means we absorb the overrun rather than you, and it is usually worth the small premium on a first project together. If something changes mid-build you hear about it before the work happens, not on the invoice.
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A static marketing site is commonly free to host and stays free at traffic levels most local businesses never reach. A well-built internal tool usually runs $10 to $50 a month. Budget 15 to 20 percent of the build cost annually for maintenance.
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Copywriting, photography, ongoing SEO work and third-party subscriptions are the four things most commonly assumed by the client and excluded by the quote. Ours states what is and is not covered explicitly.
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Yes, typically a portion up front with the remainder on delivery, or split across milestones for larger projects. The exact split is agreed in the written proposal before work starts.
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Rarely page count. Integration complexity, how much the process changes mid-build, and how clean your starting data is. Messy historical data is the single most common reason projects overrun.
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Usually. Tell us the number and we will tell you honestly what fits inside it and what does not. That is a more useful conversation than pretending everything fits.
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Yes. Scoping conversations and written proposals cost nothing and carry no obligation. We will also provide a written quote for a grant application without charging for it.
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Yes, and they are meaningful. Registered charities, non-profits and small local businesses get reduced rates on every service, because a tight budget should not be the reason an organisation is stuck with software that does not work.
Registered charities and the volunteer-run groups that support them, non-profits and community organisations, and small owner-operated businesses including new ventures still finding their feet.
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There is no application and no paperwork. Mention it in your first message and the reduced rate is built into the quote you receive.
It depends on the project and the organisation, and you are told exactly what it is before committing to anything. We do not publish a single percentage because it would be either misleading or useless.
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Often, yes, and they are widely underused. Google for Nonprofits, TechSoup Canada, community foundations and your existing funders are all worth approaching. We wrote a guide to what is actually available.
If you are small and owner-operated, yes. Ask when you get in touch and we will tell you straight rather than making you guess.
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Four stages. Scope: a conversation about the problem, not the tech. Plan: a written proposal with price and timeline. Build: short cycles with something working at the end of each one. Ship and support: deploy, hand over documented code you own outright.
A straightforward marketing site takes two to four weeks from kickoff. Applications and internal tools usually run six to twelve weeks, delivered in cycles so you see something working every week rather than waiting until the end.
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Completely. Code lives in your repositories, hosting and domains are registered in your name, and everything is documented at handover. There is no licence to keep paying and no lock-in forcing you to stay.
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You keep everything, because it was always in your accounts. Documentation and a clean handover are part of the work rather than an extra, precisely so that another developer can pick it up.
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Most of it is at the start, agreeing what gets built. After that, expect a short check-in each cycle to look at progress. The most common cause of delay is waiting on content from the client side, so having copy and images ready helps more than anything else.
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Yes, and it is normal. You hear the cost and timeline effect before the work happens, so a change is a decision you make rather than a surprise on the invoice.
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Yes. Content is set up so you can change text and images without a developer in the loop, using either a CMS or markdown depending on what suits your team.
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Yes, routinely. Send yours over or ask and we will provide one.
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Often. Being brought in for a specific piece, or to work alongside an in-house team, is common and works fine as long as the boundaries are clear up front.
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A description of the problem. Not a specification, not a wireframe, just what is going wrong or what you are trying to do. Everything else comes out of the scoping conversation.
Astro and Next.js for sites and applications, React and TypeScript on the front end, Node.js and Python on the back, PostgreSQL and MongoDB for data, and Netlify or Vercel for hosting. Chosen per project rather than by habit.
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Only when it is genuinely the right answer, which is less often than it is used. For most marketing sites a static build is faster, safer and cheaper to run. For a large store or complex memberships, WordPress earns its place.
Wherever you need it. AWS and Google Cloud both have Canadian regions in Montreal and Toronto, and hosting in Canada is straightforward and usually costs nothing extra. If your customers ask where their data lives, that is worth having a clear answer to.
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Usually not. PIPEDA does not require personal data to be stored in Canada, provided you are transparent and the data receives comparable protection. Rules that do mandate it are mostly provincial public-sector rules. Health data and government contracts are stricter, so check those specifically.
Yes. Sites are built to WCAG 2.1 AA, which covers keyboard navigation, screen readers, colour contrast and focus states. It is part of the build rather than a paid extra.
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Sub-second loads and 95 or better on Lighthouse are the target, and normally the result. Static output with no render-blocking JavaScript is most of how that is achieved.
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The technical groundwork, yes: structured data, sitemaps, clean semantics, fast pages and unique metadata per page. Ongoing content and link building is a different discipline and we will say so rather than sell it.
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A static site has no database to breach, no admin login to brute force and no plugins running server-side code, which removes most of the attack surface. Where an application does need those, authentication and permissions are built to hold up.
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Usually. If your CRM, accounting package or booking system has an API or webhooks, it can be connected. Integration between systems you already pay for is one of the highest-value things to automate.
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Backups you have actually tested, not just configured. Restoring from a backup nobody has ever tried is a plan with an unknown failure rate.
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Often not, and we will say so. It is worth it when the task involves unstructured language, the rules are fuzzy, you can tell right from wrong, and a wrong answer is survivable. Fail any of those and something simpler is the better build.
Answering questions over your own documents, extracting structure from messy input like invoices and forms, triaging and routing incoming work, and generating first drafts a human then edits. Those four cover most of the real value.
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Chatbots on the front page, which almost nobody wants. Anything needing exact numbers, because models are not calculators. And automating a process nobody has written down, which just scales the confusion.
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Less than most people expect. A well-built retrieval system for a small business commonly runs in the tens of dollars a month. Costs balloon from stuffing whole documents into every request and using the largest model for tasks a smaller one handles.
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It can, which is why systems are built to answer from your data with sources attached rather than from memory. Anything that matters gets a human in the loop, and evaluation is built in from the start so you know when it works.
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A system that takes multiple steps toward a goal without being prompted at each one. Impressive in demos, frequently disappointing in production, and the gap is engineering rather than model quality.
Worth it when your team already uses an AI assistant daily, the information lives in a system with an API, and people ask the same questions repeatedly. Start with one read-only server answering a single question, which takes days and cannot break anything.
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It is, when scoped properly. Expose the narrowest set of capabilities that answers the real questions, separate read from write, put approval gates on anything destructive, log every call, and give it its own credentials rather than a shared admin account.
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Call, email, or use the contact form. The form asks a few questions up front so the first reply can be useful rather than a request for more information.
Within one business day, usually sooner. If it is urgent, calling is faster than the form.
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Alberta, Canada. Work happens remotely with clients across Canada and the United States, over email, video calls and shared preview links.
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Regularly. Location has never been a constraint on this kind of work. Being Canadian helps with timezone overlap, invoicing in Canadian dollars and familiarity with the privacy rules, but it is not the deciding factor.
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That is the preferred starting point. No pitch deck, no pressure, and no obligation. You will get an honest read on whether the thing is worth building at all.
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That is the normal case and completely fine. Describe what is going wrong or what takes too long, and working out the shape of the solution is part of the job.
