You moved the website but forgot the furniture.

On professional discourtesy, server migrations, and what actually gets left behind when someone moves your website without paying attention.

There's a particular kind of professional discourtesy I've stopped being surprised by, but haven't stopped noticing.

You apply for a job. You send a speculative email. You follow up on a proposal. Nothing comes back. Not a no. Not a "we've gone another way." Just silence, dressed up as 'busyness'.

The same people who open every conversation with how are you? and don't wait for the answer. It's not a question. It's a noise. A social tic that lost all meaning because nobody involved expects it to mean anything.

I'm not precious about it. But I do find it interesting — because these are often the same people who will tell you, with complete confidence, that they do really good work.

Which brings me to the other thing.

I work with a furniture retailer. Good client. Brought in an agency to handle a website migration. Professional presentation, confident pitch, the whole thing.

Except that agency didn't actually migrate the site. They rebuilt it. From Visualsoft to WooCommerce — new site, new structure, content left behind. The majority of redirects went in. Not all of them. Nothing else came across.

Twelve months of remediation work followed. Custom titles written across hundreds of pages. Rank Math configured correctly. FlyingPress set up properly. Redirect gaps closed. noindex settings sorted across taxonomy pages. Slow work. But it was getting somewhere.

Then a second agency moved the site to a new server.

FlyingPress gone. Rank Math reset to defaults. The entire .htaccess redirect block dropped. 530 page titles wiped and replaced with WordPress defaults. Nearly 400 images deleted. The noindex configuration broken again — quietly telling Google not to index the pages that had just been rebuilt.

Everything built in twelve months of recovery work. Gone in an afternoon.

A migration isn't a technical lift. It's a preservation job.

Every redirect is a promise kept to a search engine that's been indexing your pages for years. Every title tag is a signal you've spent months earning. Every image is part of what someone sees before they decide whether to trust you. Every plugin configuration is a layer of work that someone did, once, for a reason.

You don't get to call the job done because the pages load.

If you're moving house, you take the furniture with you. You don't leave the beds, the wardrobes and the kitchen table on the pavement and tell the removal company the job's done because the building is empty.

They moved the website but forgot the furniture.

I'm not naming anyone. But I am saying: if you're putting your name to a migration, you're putting your name to what survives it.

Related reading: The migration checklist nobody gives you — what to verify before, during and after. And if you're already dealing with the aftermath, the contact form is here.