Five critical website migration mistakes for health and pharma brands, and how to avoid them

29th Apr 2025

Given the importance of digital visibility for health-related searches, particularly in an environment where regulations such as MHRA guidelines, PAGB codes, and GDPR must be carefully navigated, a robust SEO migration strategy is essential. At Varn, we have extensive experience partnering with health and pharmaceutical organisations to deliver smooth, secure, and successful migrations that protect both performance and compliance.

So, what exactly do we mean by a website migration? At its core, a migration involves moving your website from one environment to another — such as switching domain names, changing hosting providers, redesigning your site structure, or consolidating multiple microsites. In the health and pharma world, this often happens when updating product portfolios, merging brands post-acquisition, or aligning with new patient engagement strategies. If your plans involve changing your domain, URL structures, major page content, or sitemap hierarchy, then a strategic migration approach is critical to safeguard visibility, compliance, and audience trust.

Below, we explore five critical mistakes often made during website migrations — and how you can avoid them to ensure your health or pharmaceutical brand thrives through change.

1. Ignoring your existing performance data

In the health and pharmaceutical sector, where accuracy, trust and regulatory compliance are non-negotiable, ignoring performance data during a migration can have serious consequences. Your existing website data holds crucial insights about which content patients, healthcare professionals (HCPs), or caregivers are finding valuable.

Before making any structural or content changes, it is essential to undertake a detailed audit using tools such as Google Search Console, GA4, and SEO platforms. Examine which pages are generating organic traffic, which keywords are ranking, and which resources (such as Patient Information Leaflets, Safety Data Sheets or Clinical Trial summaries) are performing well. In particular, older documents may still attract substantial organic interest — and inadvertently removing or burying these pages can result in both a loss of trust and a drop in search rankings. Likewise, accidentally removing a link to a key piece of content could lead to a website becoming non-compliant. 

A data-led strategy allows you to protect critical information, enhance high-performing content, and ensure any updates continue to meet MHRA and PAGB guidelines, while improving accessibility for diverse audiences.

2. Overhauling analytics and consent tracking mid-migration

adjust event monitoring, or refresh cookie consent mechanisms to align with evolving GDPR requirements. However, making significant changes to your analytics setup during a migration can cause major reporting blind spots.

For strategic continuity, it is vital to maintain consistent tracking accounts across the old and new website versions. If event tracking, goals, or user journeys change drastically during migration, it becomes almost impossible to make meaningful performance comparisons — a critical gap when demonstrating ROI to internal teams or regulators.

At Varn, we recommend continuing to use existing Google Analytics and Google Search Console properties throughout the migration process, implementing new tracking layers only once post-migration benchmarks are stabilised. This approach allows health and pharmaceutical brands to track the true impact of a relaunch, and to use this data to make meaningful decisions going forward.

3. Poor redirect mapping that risks patient and HCP access

Redirects are not simply a technical afterthought — they are crucial for maintaining user trust and search engine visibility, particularly in highly regulated industries. In a health or pharma website migration, setting up 301 redirects from old URLs to their appropriate new locations is absolutely essential.

Patients and healthcare professionals may bookmark essential resources such as SPCs (Summary of Product Characteristics), dosage guidelines, patient education materials, or clinical study updates. If these URLs suddenly lead to 404 errors or irrelevant pages, it can erode trust and even breach regulatory standards around information accessibility. What’s more, from an SEO perspective, missing URLs can lead to lost rankings and traffic for your new website. 

A complete and careful redirect strategy must be based on a full crawl of your existing website, matching each legacy page to its appropriate new destination. Where exact equivalents do not exist, users should be redirected to the closest relevant page, preserving the information flow and maintaining compliance.