Every dental practice we audit asks some version of the same question: 'if we rebuild the site, what happens to our Invisalign page that took two years to rank.' The answer is that a competent migration keeps the rankings while adding the answer-engine (AEO) infrastructure the old site never had. The botched migrations you have heard about are botched for predictable reasons, and the predictable reasons are avoidable.
Why migrations fail
Three reasons. First, the new site changes the URL structure without 301 redirects, so the inbound links and the indexed pages 404 silently. Second, the new site strips out the long-form content that earned the rankings, replacing 1,800 words on Invisalign with a 200-word marketing summary. Third, the new site lacks the structured data the old site accidentally had, so the AI engines no longer pull from it. All three are preventable, and a clinic-grade migration prevents all three.
The six-week playbook
Week one: audit and URL mapping
We pull every URL from the existing site using a crawl, cross-reference Google Search Console for the URLs that have indexed and earned clicks in the last 12 months, and produce a URL map. For a typical dental site with 8 to 15 pages plus a blog, the map is roughly 30 to 60 URLs. Each existing URL gets a target URL on the new site. Procedure pages map to expanded procedure pages, the Services tab usually splits into 6 to 8 dedicated procedure pages, and the blog posts that have earned traffic get preserved at their existing slugs.
Week two: content extraction and privacy review
We extract the body content of every page that has earned rankings, keep the headline and the first 200 words verbatim, and rewrite the rest with the answer-engine infrastructure baked in. The privacy officer review happens this week so PIPEDA compliance is signed off before we wire up the new contact forms. We coordinate with your office manager on the FAQ content (the actual questions patients call about) and the office hours and accepted insurance data.
Week three: build and schema
The new site goes up on a staging URL. MedicalBusiness, Dentist, FAQPage, and the procedure-level MedicalProcedure schema all ship. The llms.txt goes in at the root. The booking widget integrates. The staging URL is locked to your IP range so search engines do not index it accidentally.
Week four: review and content polish
You and your team review the staging site. We tune copy, swap any photos you do not like, and adjust the procedure list. The Lighthouse mobile score gets validated above 90, the schema validates clean in Google's Rich Results Tester, and the canonical signals point correctly.
Week five: launch and redirect map
Launch day. We push the 301 redirect map from every old URL to its new equivalent, update the canonical tags, and submit the new sitemap to Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, and the Perplexity index. The booking widget cuts over. DNS propagates within a few hours, and the redirects pick up the search-engine traffic from day one.
Week six: monitoring and the first Cite-met report
Week six is the validation window. We watch Google Search Console for crawl errors, watch the redirect logs, and run the first Cite-met report against the six AI engines. Any URL that lost its ranking is investigated within 48 hours, and the typical fix is either a redirect adjustment or a content patch on the new page. By the end of week six the rankings are stable, the AI citation pattern starts to surface, and the old vendor relationship has been wound down cleanly.
The redirect math
301 redirects pass roughly 90 to 95 percent of the inbound link equity to the new URL. The remaining 5 to 10 percent loss is structural and unavoidable, and it is dwarfed by the lift from the new structured data and the new content depth. The Starlit Homes migration moved a 4-page Wix site to roughly 30 pages and preserved the rankings while expanding the indexed footprint by 7x. The methodology runs the same for dental.
What about the old vendor
Some dental marketing agencies own the domain registration on behalf of the practice, or own the CMS content in a vendor-specific format that does not export cleanly. We have seen this with Patterson PracticeWorks, Pro Sites, Officite, and ProSites. Week one of the audit identifies the lockout risk, and the playbook adjusts: we transfer the domain to your registrar first, extract the content via crawl rather than CMS export, and rebuild what we cannot extract. The lockout adds maybe two weeks to the timeline. Worth it once.
The PIPEDA layer
The migration is the moment to clean up the third-party tracking that the old vendor wired in. We remove the Meta pixel and the Google ad pixel from the patient intake path, route the forms through your own infrastructure, and ship a clean privacy policy that the privacy officer can sign without a six-week review. The PIPEDA cleanup is included in every migration, not an extra. Similar pattern for our law firm migrations, where the compliance bar is even higher.
What to do next
The free audit includes the full URL map and a migration risk assessment. We will tell you which pages are most at risk and what the realistic timeline is for your specific site. If your current vendor contract is up in the next six months, the audit is the right first step. If you would rather start with the cost breakdown, see the dental cost spoke. The methodology is documented further in our blog post on WordPress to headless React migration, and the same playbook adapts to dental-specific platforms.