Minds of Madness

Minds of Madness had years of episodes, an audience that arrived through search, and a back catalogue of URLs that other sites, directories and listeners had been linking to since 2022.

That history is exactly what makes a migration dangerous. Move a site like this carelessly and the traffic does not come back: every old episode link 404s, the search rankings built up over years reset, and the analytics record that would have told you what went wrong starts again from zero on the day you broke it.

A custom build on Vercel, with the episode catalogue driven by the podcast's own feed. Episodes load through a server-side proxy rather than being fetched in the browser, because the public CORS proxies that approach depends on have a habit of disappearing without notice.

The old WordPress episode URLs were mapped to their new homes rather than abandoned, so a link posted years ago still lands on the right episode. The existing analytics tag was carried across deliberately instead of starting a fresh property, which is what keeps the before and after comparable at all.

Beyond the migration: an interactive map of the cases, and a homepage that pulls the channel's latest full episode automatically so the front page is current without anyone redeploying it.

Traffic held steady straight through the domain cutover — the months after the move sit in line with the months before it, and ahead of the same period a year earlier. For a migration of this kind, no change is the win.

The first Search Console coverage report after launch listed twelve broken URLs. Exactly one was a genuine gap from the migration, fixed with a permanent redirect the same day. The rest were automated scanners probing for WordPress files that no longer exist and long-dead affiliate links that predate our involvement.