A new site that keeps the old traffic.

Wasabi is a cloud storage company competing against some of the biggest names in tech. As it grew, its WordPress site started to look dated next to the services it was selling.

The fix was a rebrand and a move to Storyblok, a headless CMS. Headless means the content lives separately from the site’s design, so developers can build faster, more flexible pages.

Most of Wasabi’s organic traffic came from branded searches, people already looking for Wasabi by name. That traffic had to survive the move.

But branded search only grows as fast as the brand does. The new site also had to compete for non-branded searches: people looking for cloud storage who didn’t know Wasabi yet.

I crawled the old site with Screaming Frog to build a full content catalogue, then added the numbers that showed what each page was worth:

Leads made this catalogue different from a standard SEO audit. A page with modest traffic that produced leads wasn’t expendable.

For a similar catalogue built around a brand name going away, see the content matrix from the Aramark → Vestis migration.

The most important pages got extra protection. Their new versions had to match the old ones as closely as possible, 1:1, while still fitting the new design.

The new site was organized around three kinds of content:

Every section needed some mix of new content, repurposed content and new landing pages. Keyword research and search intent drove the structure and the URL patterns, so each section lined up with how people actually search.

The international sites got the same scrutiny. Six of the twelve localized subsites were single landing pages with no traffic and no search presence, so they were consolidated. The six that remained got hreflang tags, which tell Google which language and region version to show each searcher.

With the IA set, the content work split three ways: writing new pages where there were gaps, repurposing existing content into its new home, and building landing pages around the non-branded searches the research had turned up.

Pages marked “keep” moved over with their content intact, so the rankings they’d earned had something to hold on to.

The redirect map was built from the planned IA, before a single page existed in Storyblok. Every old URL got a destination.

Priority pages from the catalogue got hand-picked 1:1 matches with their closest new equivalent, so the traffic, rankings and backlinks they’d earned went to a page that deserved them.

The move from WordPress to Storyblok ran two ways, depending on the content. I worked with the developers throughout, mapping old content to new fields and reviewing pages as they were built.

Before launch, I went through the dev site looking for anything that would hurt users or rankings. Common migration problems include filter pages creating duplicate content, canonical tags pointing to the wrong place, and pages that looked right but read wrong to a crawler.

Then I crawled the dev site with Screaming Frog and compared it with the old site. For every high-priority page, the new title tags, headers and other on-page signals had to line up with what the old page had earned rankings for.

New XML sitemaps told search engines what pages existed on the new site. A new robots.txt told them what to crawl and what to skip. The hreflang setup was confirmed across the six international sites.

At launch, the whole team watched two things: redirects and traffic. We checked redirects on the live site, monitored traffic against the old baseline, and fixed problems as they appeared, not a week later in a report.