Migrating a Marketing Site to Next.js Without Losing Your Rankings

We have migrated dozens of marketing sites onto Next.js. The ones that kept their traffic all did the same unglamorous things first.

Crawl the old site before you touch anything

Export every URL, its status code, its title, its meta description and its inbound link count. This is your source of truth. Without it you are guessing at what you broke.

The redirect map comes before the design

Every single old URL needs a 301 to its closest equivalent. Not to the homepage — that is treated as a soft 404 and you will lose the equity. If there is genuinely no equivalent, let it 410.

Match or improve, never regress

Titles, meta descriptions, heading structure, internal linking, structured data. If the old page had an FAQ schema block, the new one needs it too.

Launch on a Tuesday morning

Never on a Friday. You want the whole team available for the forty-eight hours when problems surface, and you want Search Console data coming in while people are at their desks.