Website migration SEO checklist

Key takeaways

A website migration SEO checklist protects your rankings when URLs, platform or domain change. The essentials are a complete map of old URLs to new ones, a 301 redirect for every old URL, content and metadata carried across, testing before launch, and at least 90 days of monitoring in Search Console afterwards. Most traffic losses come from missing redirects.

• Crawl the old site and export every URL before anything changes.
• Map each old URL to its closest new equivalent, not all to the homepage.
• Use permanent 301 redirects and keep them for at least a year.
• Carry across titles, headings, content and structured data that rank.
• Monitor Search Console for 90 days and fix errors quickly.

What is a website migration?

A website migration is any significant change to a website's URLs, platform, domain, structure or protocol that can affect how search engines crawl, index and rank it, such as moving to a new CMS, changing domain, or restructuring pages.

A redesign that keeps every URL and all content is low risk. A rebuild that changes URLs, removes pages or moves domain is high risk, and needs a plan.

Why do migrations lose traffic?

Traffic is lost when search engines cannot connect old pages to new ones. If a page that ranked for years returns a 404 error, its signals are not passed on, and visitors from old links and bookmarks hit a dead end.

Other causes include content removed or thinned during the redesign, titles and headings changed without thought, internal links broken, and development settings such as noindex left in place at launch.

• Missing or incorrect redirects.
• Everything redirected to the homepage.
• Content that ranked removed or rewritten away.
• Noindex or robots.txt blocks left from staging.
• Internal links still pointing at old URLs.

What do you do before launch?

Most of the work happens before launch. Google's documentation on site moves with URL changes sets out the core steps.

• 1. Crawl the old site and export every URL, including images and PDFs that get traffic.
• 2. Export top pages and queries from Search Console and analytics as a baseline.
• 3. Map every old URL to its most relevant new URL in a spreadsheet.
• 4. Carry across titles, meta descriptions, headings and content for ranking pages.
• 5. Implement 301 redirects on the new site, one-to-one where possible.
• 6. Update internal links to point directly at new URLs.
• 7. Prepare a new XML sitemap.
• 8. Test redirects and crawl the staging site before launch.

• Google Search Console for small businesses

What do you check on launch day?

Launch early in the week, at a quiet time, with the team available to fix problems.

• Remove any noindex tags and robots.txt blocks from staging.
• Test a sample of old URLs to confirm they redirect correctly.
• Submit the new sitemap in Search Console.
• Use the Change of Address tool if the domain has changed.
• Test every form, phone link and WhatsApp button.
• Confirm analytics and key events are firing.

• Website launch checklist

What do you monitor after launch?

Check Search Console daily for the first week and weekly for three months. Watch Page indexing for spikes in not found errors, the Performance report for drops in clicks on key pages, and crawl the new site to find broken links.

Some fluctuation is normal for a few weeks as Google processes the move. A sustained drop on specific pages usually points to a missing redirect or lost content, which you can fix page by page. Keep redirects in place for at least a year, and ideally permanently.

When is a migration not worth the risk?

If your current URLs are clean and descriptive, keep them. Changing URLs for cosmetic reasons adds risk with little gain. Similarly, avoid changing domain unless there is a strong business reason, such as a rebrand.

The trade-off is structure against continuity. Sometimes a new structure is worth it for the long term. When it is, do the migration properly rather than cutting corners.

• Website redesign versus rebuild

What does this look like in practice?

A pattern after poorly planned rebuilds: organic traffic falls sharply after launch, and Search Console shows hundreds of not found errors for old service and blog URLs that were never redirected.

Building the redirect map retrospectively recovers much of the traffic over the following weeks, but the lost months are not recovered. A day spent mapping URLs before launch would have prevented it.

• What makes a business website effective
• See the three problems we fix for UK businesses

Migration checklist

Print this and tick it off.

• Crawl and export all old URLs.
• Save baseline Search Console and analytics data.
• Map every old URL to a new URL.
• Carry across ranking content and metadata.
• Implement and test 301 redirects.
• Update internal links.
• Remove staging blocks at launch.
• Submit the new sitemap.
• Monitor for 90 days.
• Keep redirects for at least a year.

Next step

If your new website will change URLs or domain, we will review your migration plan with you in 30 minutes before launch, when fixes are cheapest.