IA and site migration
Creating information architecture and managing website migrations is one of those behind-the-scenes efforts I like to call secret UX. When done right, no one notices—but when done badly, everyone feels it.
After years of working on large-scale IA projects and complex site migrations, I’ve come to see this work as equal parts strategy, empathy, and meticulous planning.
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Designing a site’s information architecture isn’t just about organising content—it’s about understanding what your users are trying to achieve, and how they navigate - often in ways that don’t match internal business structures. I've run numerous card sorts, tree tests, stakeholder and user interviews to discover the patterns and tensions that help inform a structure that feels intuitive to users and scalable for the organisation.
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When it comes to migrations, there’s rarely a clean slate. You’re often working with various legacy systems, outdated content, lack of SEO and accessibility consideration, all while trying to build a better future state. I’ve managed migrations involving thousands of URLs, where the challenge isn’t just technical—it’s about protecting search equity, preserving user trust, and avoiding disruption to business-critical flows.
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A successful migration starts long before the first redirect is written. It requires a deep audit of content, a clear IA strategy, collaboration across disciplines, and a strong focus on governance - something I am very familiar with having worked in complex industries like insurance and financial services.
You have to think about taxonomy, metadata, internal linking, potentially combining different sites and how to map the old to the new in a way that makes sense to both humans and search engines.
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There’s a lot of collaboration and planning required—considering teams, priorities and constraints. But getting it right is really satisfying!
Seeing bounce rates drop, search rankings recover, and knowing users can find what they need more easily. It’s a kind of secret UX that supports everything else.
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At the end of the day, IA and migration work is about creating clarity from chaos—turning sprawling, disjointed content into something structured, sustainable, and user-friendly. And after doing this for years, I can confidently say: the devil is in the detail, and the payoff is in the planning.
