Two Legacy Education Brand Sites Replatformed to Drupal with Zero Ranking Loss

Global University Systems undertook a major technical overhaul, replatforming two legacy education brand websites onto a unified Drupal CMS. In higher education, prospective student recruitment relies heavily on organic search visibility for course and programme discovery across competitive domestic and international student cohorts.

Large CMS migrations carry severe commercial search risks: broken redirect chains, missed URL patterns, and staging template oversights frequently decimate commercial organic traffic for months. In this replatform, even a brief drop in rankings would disrupt annual enquiry cycles and application pipelines. The business required complete technical modernisation without putting critical student enquiry volume or enrolment pipeline at risk.

• Collaborated directly with engineering and development teams across architecture planning, staging tests, and live deployment.
• Audited legacy URL taxonomies and mapped every historical page to its corresponding Drupal destination.
• Designed and validated 301 redirect architecture, canonical structures, and hreflang tag consistency across both education brand domains.
• Conducted pre-launch staging audits to verify schema markup, internal link graphs, and indexation controls.
• Managed the cutover window, validating server response codes and redirect loops in real time during DNS release.
• Monitored post-launch crawl logs and search console indexes daily to resolve minor variances immediately.

The replatform executed smoothly across both brand domains, protecting established commercial rankings and preventing organic pipeline interruption.