If you have a realtor website on WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, or another general purpose builder, and you are considering moving to Charcom, here is the practical migration playbook.
Before we dig in: do not move just because someone said you should. Move because the existing platform is genuinely limiting your business. Migration takes time and energy, and a great existing site is better than a mediocre migrated one.
The right signal to migrate is some combination of these. Your current site does not rank. You cannot edit it without paying your developer. The MLS integration is an embedded widget. You changed brokerages and want to be on a platform you own. Performance is bad on mobile. The platform is sunsetting features you need.
What migrates well
Content migrates well. Your existing blog posts, your bio, your testimonials, your About copy, your contact details, your service area descriptions. All of it moves over without significant loss.
Listings migrate well, in the sense that the new MLS feed will populate listings on day one. You do not need to manually migrate your listings page, the feed regenerates it.
Some images migrate well. Headshots, listing photos that you have rights to, hero images. They get re uploaded to the new site and served from the new domain.
What does not migrate well
Custom code. If your WordPress site has heavy plugin customization, custom PHP, or a developer built layer on top of the theme, that customization does not transfer. The new site has its own architecture, and rebuilding custom features requires platform-specific development.
Some images do not migrate well. Stock photos that you licensed for the old site may not have rights for the new site. Photographer credits and copyright on listing photos can be edge cases.
SEO authority partially migrates. URLs change when you move platforms, which means individual page authority can drop temporarily as Google reindexes. The way to preserve most authority is through 301 redirects (covered below).
The migration sequence
Step 1: Audit the existing site. Open Google Search Console, sort your URLs by clicks. The top 10 to 20 URLs are your most valuable. List them in a spreadsheet. For each, note the URL, the title, and the rough purpose. These are the URLs that need 301 redirects after the move.
Step 2: Sign up for Charcom and complete onboarding. Pick your subdomain (yourname.charcom.ca), pick your theme, fill in the basics. This takes 5 to 10 minutes. The new site is live on a temporary subdomain immediately.
Step 3: Migrate content. For each page you want on the new site (bio, neighbourhood guides, blog posts, etc.), copy the content from the old site and paste it into the new site's editor. This is manual work but typically takes only 1 to 2 hours total for a moderately sized realtor site.
Step 4: Reupload images. Listing photos, your headshot, lifestyle shots. Charcom's editor accepts direct uploads.
Step 5: Connect the MLS feed. Go to your TRREB AMPRE portal (covered in another post), authorize Charcom, paste the token. First sync runs within an hour.
Step 6: Set up the custom domain. In Charcom's dashboard at /dashboard/domain, enter your existing domain. Charcom shows you the DNS records to add at your registrar (Cloudflare, GoDaddy, Namecheap, wherever). Add them. SSL provisions automatically within 10 minutes of DNS propagation.
Step 7: Test everything on the live URL. Go through every page on the new site. Click every link. Submit a test lead form. Make sure mobile looks right. Have a colleague look at it on their phone.
Step 8: Redirect old URLs. This is the critical SEO step. For every old URL from your spreadsheet, set up a 301 redirect to the new equivalent. WordPress users can install the Redirection plugin. Squarespace and Wix have built in redirect managers. The redirect tells Google "this content moved permanently to the new URL", and Google transfers most of the SEO authority over the next 90 days.
Step 9: Submit the new sitemap to Google. Search Console, Sitemaps, paste in https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. Google starts crawling within 24 hours.
Step 10: Watch the analytics. For the next 90 days, monitor your traffic. Expect a temporary dip in the first 4 to 6 weeks as Google reindexes, followed by a recovery and usually an improvement as the new site's faster performance and better SEO foundations kick in.
How long it takes
End to end, for a moderately complex realtor site (15 to 25 pages, 10 to 30 listings, a small backlog of blog posts), the migration takes about 6 to 10 hours of your time, spread across 2 to 4 days. You can do it in a long weekend if you focus.
The technical setup (Charcom signup, theme, MLS feed, custom domain) is the fast part. Content migration is the slow part, but most of it is copying and pasting.
When to migrate vs when to wait
Migrate now if any of the trigger conditions in the intro apply. Wait if you are in the middle of a busy season and cannot dedicate the time, if you are about to change brokerages (do both at once), or if your existing site is genuinely strong and just needs minor improvements.
The cost of migrating well is one weekend. The cost of staying on a bad platform is years of compound losses in leads not captured and SEO not built. The math heavily favours moving sooner, not later.