Case Study
Albest: migrating a business directory from Joomla to Next.js without breaking SEO
The Problem
Albest is an Albanian business directory that ran on legacy Joomla and shared hosting. It needed a modern, faster site, but a hard switch risked losing search rankings and breaking thousands of existing URLs.
What I Did
- Moved hosting from shared hosting to a Dockerized VPS with Nginx.
- Migrated gradually (strangler pattern) to Next.js, so old and new pages ran side by side during the transition.
- Sorted every legacy URL into keep, redirect or retire (410), and exported old pages statically where a rebuild was not worth it.
- Prepared a DNS cutover checklist so the switch happened in a planned window.
- Technical SEO: metadata audit, clean slugs that handle Albanian diacritics, structured data, canonical tags, and duplicate-content fixes.
- Ongoing maintenance after launch.
Stack
Result
- [X] pages/URLs migrated
- [X minutes/hours] of downtime at cutover
- [Search Console: clicks / impressions / indexed pages, before vs after, with the date range]
- Long-running client: [X months] of continued work since launch
What I would tell a new client
Migrations fail on URLs and redirects, not on code. I plan those first, then build.