Website Migration SEO Checklist: Move Your Site Without Losing Traffic

A website migration is any change that moves pages to new addresses or changes how Google sees them: a redesign, a new CMS, a new domain, HTTPS, or a new URL structure. Done carelessly, it is the fastest way to lose rankings you spent years earning. Done properly, traffic usually dips a little for a few weeks and then settles.

The difference is preparation. Below is the checklist I work through on every move, split into before, during and after launch. If you only have time for one part, do the before section: you can't recover what you never recorded.

Before the migration: record what you have

• Crawl the current site. Export every URL with its status code, title, meta description, H1, canonical and indexability. Screaming Frog or a similar crawler is fine.
• Export performance data. Pull the last 12 to 16 months of pages and queries from Google Search Console and landing pages from analytics. These tell you which URLs actually matter.
• List pages with backlinks. Any URL other sites link to must keep working. Export them from Search Console's Links report or your SEO tool.
• Save the XML sitemaps and robots.txt. You'll want them for comparison after launch.
• Benchmark rankings and speed. Track your main keywords and record PageSpeed for key templates, so you can prove what changed.
• Agree what is in scope. Which pages move, which get merged, which are retired. Write it down.

Map every old URL to a new one

The redirect map is the heart of the migration. It is a simple spreadsheet: old URL in one column, new URL in the next, status code in the third. Every URL that has traffic, links or rankings needs a row.

• Match like with like. A service page goes to the new version of that service page, a blog post to the same post. If a page is retired, send it to the closest relevant page, not the home page.
• Use 301 redirects for permanent moves, one hop only. Avoid chains like A → B → C.
• Keep URLs that don't need to change. The fewer URLs you change, the less risk you take.
• Don't forget the odd ones: PDFs, images that rank, old campaign URLs, URLs with and without trailing slashes, and HTTP versions.

I've cleaned up migrations where every old URL had been pointed at the contact page. The site looked fine, but Google saw hundreds of pages disappear at once. Re-pointing them one by one was what brought the pages back. You can see that job on the website migration service page.

Carry the SEO across, not just the content

• Titles and meta descriptions for every important page.
• Headings, body copy and images with their alt text. Don't let a redesign quietly cut the text that was ranking.
• Structured data: organisation, services, products, articles, FAQs, breadcrumbs.
• Canonical tags pointing at the new URLs, not the old ones.
• Internal links updated to the new URLs, so you don't rely on redirects inside your own site.
• Hreflang, if the site has more than one language or country.

Test on staging before launch

Crawl the staging site exactly as you crawled the old one, and compare. You are looking for missing pages, changed titles, broken links, accidental noindex tags and pages that only render with JavaScript. Test a sample of redirects too, if your setup allows it. Block staging from search engines with a password, not only with a noindex tag that might be copied to production.

Launch day checklist

• Redirects live and tested against the full map.
• Robots.txt allows crawling and no stray noindex tags remain from staging.
• New XML sitemap submitted in Search Console. For a domain change, use the Change of Address tool.
• Analytics and conversion tracking firing on the new site.
• Forms, checkout and key journeys tested by hand.
• Spot-check the top 50 old URLs: each should land on the right new page in one hop.

After launch: what to watch and for how long

Check Search Console daily for the first week, then weekly for at least two to three months. Watch the Pages report for spikes in "Not found" or "Crawled, currently not indexed", and compare clicks and impressions for your top pages against the benchmark you saved.

A small dip in the first few weeks is normal while Google recrawls. A drop that keeps going, or that hits specific sections, usually means something in the map or the on-page SEO went wrong. If that's where you are, my guide to redesigning without losing traffic covers the most common causes, and the traffic drop recovery service is built for exactly that situation.

How long does a website migration take?

For a typical business site, planning and mapping take one to three weeks, the launch itself a day, and monitoring a few weeks to a few months. Large ecommerce sites take longer, mostly because there are more URLs to map. The work before launch is what decides how quiet the weeks after it will be.

Not sure whether your site is ready to move? An SEO audit before the migration gives you a clean baseline and catches problems you'd otherwise carry over to the new site.

Jesús Sisco

Technical SEO and WordPress specialist with five years of hands-on work on real business sites: migrations, traffic drops, speed and builds. I run Tormet Labs and Bricks Migrate from Madeira.

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