The short version
- The situation: a multi-language site moving to Webflow, with trial signups riding on the pages being moved.
- The move: measure the new website on trial signups, not traffic, and cut the site from ~9,300 pages showing up in Google to ~2,400 on purpose.
- The result: weekly organic trials tripled during launch week and were 5x the baseline a month in. Branded rank improved from 2.2 to 1.5.
- The lesson: a new website exposes weak pages. It does not fix them.
The situation
Rentman makes rental and production management software for the AV and live events industry. In summer 2025 they were moving their multi-language site to Webflow: a global homepage, local homepages per market, and the bottom-funnel pages that produce organic trial signups.
That last part is the whole risk. The standard advice says expect a dip after a migration, SEO's word for a new website. Rentman could not afford a dip on the pages that feed the trial funnel, and "we will recover in a few months" is not a plan when signups are the number the business watches weekly.
What I did
| The move | Why it mattered |
|---|---|
| Trial signups as the success metric, not sessions | The KPI set was defined around trial signups before launch, with organic traffic to priority pages, rankings for 14 focus keywords, and the number of pages showing up in Google as leading indicators. If trials held, the new website worked. |
| The assessment before anyone touched a URL | A pre-launch assessment fixed the focus pages, reviewed the new URL structure for long-term scalability, and produced the redirect mapping: the list that sends visitors and Google from each old page address to the new one. On launch day there was nothing to debate, only things to check. |
| Shrink the site on purpose | The move cut the pages showing up in Google from roughly 9,300 to roughly 2,400. That sounds terrifying in a checklist world. It was deliberate: thin and duplicate pages went, the pages that earn trials stayed. |
| A fixed monitoring cadence after launch | Launch week, then the one-month review. Not "check when something feels off". The cadence is what catches problems while they are still cheap. |
What happened
The metric the new website was supposed to protect went up instead:
- 3× weekly organic trial signups during launch week itself
- 5× the baseline before launch, four weeks later, still climbing week over week, driven by the global homepage with the local homepages and bottom-funnel pages contributing steadily behind it
The leading indicators backed it up:
- +362% average weekly organic session growth across the priority pages
- +52% homepage organic sessions week over week since launch
- 2.2 to 1.5 ranking on the main branded search
- 13 of 14 focus keywords held or gained positions
The only traffic that dropped came from pages we intentionally redirected away. Nothing that was supposed to survive got hurt.
What I'd tell you honestly
One keyword fell hard, and I let it. "Equipment tracking" dropped 43 positions. It is a broad, informational query far from a trial decision, and chasing it would have meant rebuilding a page for traffic that does not convert. Losing it was a cheaper outcome than defending it.
Flat pages stayed flat. The solution pages did not dip, but they did not grow either. A new website done right carries your rankings across; it does not fix content, positioning, or a mismatch with what searchers want. Those pages needed a strategy conversation, not a redirect.
What I would do differently: give every post-launch fix an owner and a date. At the one-month review, a 404 cleanup I had flagged as high priority was still open, and mobile page speed had slipped on a site where 45% of traffic is mobile. Flagging a problem is not fixing it. My post-launch reviews now leave with each item assigned, not just listed.
I’m a revenue-first SEO consultant for B2B and SaaS teams. 14+ years of hands-on work, from in-house at Mollie to new websites for Backbase and Rentman. I also run the Amsterdam SEO Salon.
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