Built from real migration disasters

Since 2018, I've been working in development agencies focused on websites and e-commerce. As a project manager for most of my roles, I was responsible for working with development teams and delivering the final product to customers.

We always had new projects being built, usually for people launching a new version of their website or migrating to a new platform. When marketing or SEO agencies weren't involved, the SEO verification task fell to me.

This usually became my responsibility because it isn't necessarily a developer's task. It resulted in me:

• Performing manual crawls with Screaming Frog SEO Spider
• Comparing data in Excel using VLOOKUPs to see if redirects matched
• Checking H1s, titles, canonicals, and other similar elements

While some of this can be integrated with Screaming Frog, it is still a manual, labor-intensive hassle.

I recently built a new version of my personal blog. It generates actual traffic and runs Google AdSense, so it brings in revenue. During that process, I realized this could be done better, which is why I built PreflightSEO. I wanted the peace of mind of having an automated list I could rerun to ensure everything worked during my own migration.

Beyond using it for my own blog, I'm now using it for client projects at the agency where I work. This is the real reason I built the tool. All the potential SEO failures (missing redirects, forgotten noindex tags, broken canonicals) are things I've seen go wrong firsthand, and I've validated these issues through discussions with others on Reddit as well.

- Hugo