SEO Website Migration Checklist: Move Your Site Without Losing Rankings

What is an SEO website migration checklist?

A website migration is any significant change to your domain, URLs, platform, structure or design that can affect how search engines crawl, index and rank your site. An SEO website migration checklist is the step-by-step list of tasks that protects your organic traffic through that change: what to record before you move, what to test before go-live, what to check on launch day and what to monitor in the weeks after.

Search engines have spent a long time learning which of your URLs answer which searches. A migration asks them to relearn much of that at once. When redirects are missing, content disappears or a staging noindex tag slips into production, rankings that took years to build can fall away within days. Most of those losses are preventable, and nearly all of them come down to process rather than bad luck.

Use this checklist whether you are rebranding to a new domain, moving to a new CMS, redesigning your templates or merging two websites. Work through the sections in order, give every task an owner and keep a shared record of what was done and when.

Types of website migration and their SEO risk

Not every migration carries the same risk. The more URLs, content and templates that change at once, the more signals search engines have to reprocess, and the more can go wrong.

Combining several changes at once, such as a new domain, a new platform and a redesign on the same day, multiplies the risk and makes any problem much harder to diagnose. If your timeline allows, stage the changes. If it doesn’t, the rest of this SEO website migration checklist becomes even more important.

Replatforming to Magento, WordPress or a custom build

Platform moves deserve special care because every CMS generates URLs, metadata and templates differently.

• Magento (Adobe Commerce): check URL suffixes such as .html, whether product URLs include category paths, how layered navigation creates filter URLs and whether canonical tags are enabled for products and categories. Our Magento development team configures these settings before the first product is imported.
• WordPress: set the permalink structure to match your redirect map, decide how category and tag archives are handled and make sure the “discourage search engines” setting used on staging is switched off at launch. Our WordPress development services include this setup as standard.
• Custom or headless builds: confirm that key content is rendered in the HTML, that status codes are correct (a missing page must return a real 404, not a 200) and that titles and descriptions can be edited without a developer. Our web development team builds these controls in from the start.

Before you start: goals, owners and timing

A migration is a project, not a task. Before any technical work begins:

1. Write down why you are migrating and what success looks like, for example “organic sessions stay within their normal range and recover fully within three months”.
2. Name an owner for SEO sign-off who can delay the launch if critical checks fail.
3. Choose a quiet launch window. Avoid your peak trading season, major sales and the days just before a public holiday or long weekend, when your developers may not be around to fix problems.
4. Agree a content freeze on the old site so the URL inventory doesn’t change after you have mapped it.
5. Budget time for testing. Redirect mapping and staging QA almost always take longer than expected.

If the migration is part of a wider rebuild, our guide to how much web design costs explains why SEO migration work should be a clear line item in the quote rather than an afterthought.

Pre-migration SEO checklist

Most migration failures are decided before launch. This is the longest part of the SEO website migration checklist, and it is the part teams most often rush.

1. Run a benchmark crawl

1. Crawl the live site with an SEO crawler and save the full export: every URL, status code, title, meta description, H1, canonical tag, meta robots tag, word count and internal link count.
2. Crawl any separate mobile, subdomain or international versions of the site.
3. Record page speed and Core Web Vitals for each key template, such as the homepage, category pages, product or service pages and blog posts.
4. Store the crawl somewhere permanent. You will compare against it for months.

2. Record analytics and Search Console baselines

1. Export at least twelve months of organic landing page data from analytics, including sessions, conversions and revenue, so seasonality is visible.
2. In Google Search Console, export clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position by page and by query, along with the page indexing report.
3. Record rankings for your priority keywords, including mobile and local results where they matter to you.
4. Note seasonal patterns so a normal dip isn’t mistaken for a migration problem.
5. Verify the new domain or property in Search Console before launch, ideally with DNS verification so it survives the move.

3. Build a complete URL inventory

A crawl only finds pages that are linked internally. Combine it with every other source of URLs:

• URLs listed in your current XML sitemaps
• Landing pages from analytics and Search Console
• Pages with external backlinks, exported from your backlink tool
• URLs that search engine crawlers request in your server logs
• PDFs, images and other files that attract traffic or links

Deduplicate the list and flag the pages that matter most: top traffic, top conversions and most linked. These are your “must not fail” URLs, and they get checked by hand at every stage.

4. Create the redirect map

The redirect map is the heart of any migration. It pairs every old URL with its new destination, and it is where most of the value of this website migration checklist is won or lost.

1. Map each old URL to its closest equivalent new page, one to one wherever possible.
2. Use 301 (permanent) redirects for permanent moves. Google’s guide to redirects and Google Search explains how permanent and temporary redirects are treated.
3. Don’t send everything to the homepage. Irrelevant redirects are often treated as soft 404s and pass little value.
4. If a page is being retired with no equivalent, let it return a 404 or 410, unless it has valuable backlinks, in which case redirect it to the most relevant category or topic page.
5. Avoid redirect chains. Old URLs, including legacy redirects already in place, should reach their final destination in a single hop.
6. Handle patterns such as trailing slashes, uppercase letters, www versus non-www and HTTP versus HTTPS with rules, and individual pages with a lookup list.
7. Have someone who knows the products and services review the map, not just the person who built the spreadsheet.

5. Check content and metadata parity

A new design shouldn’t mean less content. For every priority page, compare the old and new versions:

• Title tags, meta descriptions and H1s
• Body copy, including FAQs, tables, specifications and product descriptions
• Internal links, breadcrumbs and how many clicks the page sits from the homepage
• Structured data such as products, reviews, FAQs, organisation and breadcrumbs
• Image file names, alt text and image URLs
• Canonical tags, plus hreflang annotations on international sites

If you are deliberately cutting or merging content, decide which pages will be consolidated and where their redirects will point. Our content writing team can strengthen thin pages so the new site launches in better shape than the old one.

6. Protect the staging site

1. Put staging behind a password or an IP restriction. This is the most reliable way to keep it out of search results.
2. If you also use noindex tags or a robots.txt disallow rule on staging, add their removal to the launch-day list so they don’t follow the site into production.
3. Make sure staging URLs never appear in sitemaps, canonical tags or internal links on the live site.

7. Prepare tracking and measurement

1. Confirm your analytics and tag manager code is installed on every new template.
2. Recreate conversion events, form tracking, e-commerce tracking and call tracking.
3. Test that every conversion fires on staging, then test again on production.
4. Add an annotation or change-log entry for the launch date so every future report shows exactly when the move happened.

8. Test everything on staging

Crawl the staging site and compare it with your benchmark crawl, template by template. Then run your full list of old URLs against staging or a test server and confirm each one resolves in a single hop to the right page with a 200 status. Fix issues before launch, not after.

Launch-day website migration checklist

If the preparation is done, launch day should be the least eventful part of the project. Work through these steps in order:

1. Take a final backup of the old site, its database and its server configuration.
2. Deploy the redirects at the same moment the new site goes live, not days later.
3. Remove staging protections: password protection, noindex tags, the WordPress “discourage search engines” setting and any robots.txt disallow rules.
4. Check robots.txt on the live domain allows crawling of important pages and resources, including CSS and JavaScript files.
5. Crawl your old URL list and confirm each returns a 301 to the correct destination, which then returns a 200.
6. Spot-check your “must not fail” pages by hand on desktop and mobile.
7. Confirm canonical tags, hreflang and structured data reference the new live URLs, not staging or old addresses.
8. Submit your new XML sitemaps in Search Console. Google’s sitemaps overview covers the format and size limits. Some teams also submit a temporary sitemap of the old URLs so crawlers find the redirects sooner.
9. Use the Change of Address tool in Search Console if you have moved to a new domain.
10. Test tracking with real-time analytics, test form submissions, test purchases and phone click events.
11. Update the links you control: your Google Business Profile, social profiles, email signatures, directory listings and paid ad final URLs.

Google’s own guide to site moves with URL changes is worth reading in full before launch day, as it walks through preparing, starting and monitoring a move.

Post-migration SEO checklist: the first three months

Search engines don’t process a migration instantly. Google notes that a medium-sized site can take a few weeks for most pages to move, and larger sites take longer. Monitor in three phases.

The first 72 hours

1. Recrawl the new site daily and fix any new 404s, redirect chains, loops or 5xx server errors.
2. Review server logs to confirm search engine crawlers are requesting the old URLs and following the redirects.
3. Watch Search Console for crawl errors, security issues and manual actions.
4. Compare conversions and revenue with the same days in previous weeks.
5. Keep developers on standby for quick fixes.

Weeks 1–4

1. Track indexing in the Search Console page indexing report. New URLs should climb as old URLs drop out.
2. Compare organic traffic against your baseline page by page, not only sitewide, so problems in one section aren’t hidden by gains elsewhere.
3. Check that the pages with the most backlinks redirect correctly, and ask the owners of your most valuable links to update them to the new URLs.
4. Review rankings for priority keywords. Some movement is normal; a steady decline on one template suggests a specific problem.
5. Look for crawl waste, such as crawlers getting stuck in filter, sort or internal search URLs.

Months 2–3

1. Confirm traffic and rankings have settled near or above the baseline.
2. Check Core Web Vitals field data for the new templates.
3. Remove any temporary sitemap of old URLs and keep the new sitemaps clean.
4. Keep every redirect in place. Google recommends keeping redirects for as long as possible, generally for at least a year, and we recommend keeping them permanently for any URL with backlinks.
5. Renew the old domain for the long term so the redirects never break.
6. Write up what worked and what didn’t, ready for your next project.

Common website migration mistakes that cost rankings

These are the mistakes we see most often when auditing a migration that went wrong:

• Launching without a redirect map, or mapping only the top pages and leaving the long tail to fail.
• Redirecting every old URL to the homepage, which usually throws away their value.
• Leaving noindex tags or a robots.txt block from staging on the live site.
• Using temporary (302) redirects for a permanent move and never changing them.
• Dropping content such as FAQs, product descriptions or category copy in the name of a cleaner design.
• Forgetting non-HTML assets, including images, PDFs and downloads that earned links.
• Leaving internal links pointing at old URLs, so every click and crawl passes through a redirect.
• Breaking tracking, so nobody can tell whether traffic really dropped.
• Letting the old domain expire, which breaks every redirect and backlink at once.
• Changing everything at the same time, which makes the cause of any drop almost impossible to isolate.

What to do if traffic drops after a site migration

A short dip is common. A drop that deepens after the first few weeks, or one that hits particular sections hard, needs investigating. Work through the likely causes in this order:

1. Confirm the drop is real. Check that tracking fires on every template, and compare with Search Console clicks, which don’t depend on your analytics tag.
2. Find where the losses are. Compare traffic by old landing page against the baseline. Losses usually cluster in specific templates, folders or page types.
3. Test the redirects for those pages. Look for 404s, chains, loops, 302s and redirects to irrelevant pages.
4. Check indexability. Look for noindex tags, blocked resources, incorrect canonical tags and pages missing from the sitemap.
5. Compare the content. If the new pages are thinner, slower or less relevant than the old ones, restore what was lost.
6. Check internal linking. Pages that lost their navigation or contextual links often lose rankings too.
7. Rule out outside factors. Seasonality, competitor activity and search engine updates can coincide with a launch. Our guide to Google algorithm updates for Australian businesses explains how to tell an update apart from a site problem.

Once the causes are fixed, request indexing for your most important pages and resubmit your sitemap. Recovery typically follows within a few weeks to a few months, depending on how long the issues were live and how large the site is.

If you are already in this position, our technical SEO specialists can audit the migration, rebuild missing redirects and prioritise the fixes most likely to bring traffic back.

How Glorvix uses this SEO website migration checklist

We treat every migration as a joint project between SEO and development. Our technical SEO team owns the benchmark, the redirect map and the QA, while our developers, or yours, build the new site. That covers full rebuilds, Magento replatforms, WordPress migrations and domain changes for businesses in the USA and Australia.

You get a written migration plan, a go/no-go review against this SEO website migration checklist before launch and monitoring reports afterwards, so you always know where your traffic stands.

Planning a move? Contact our team for a free SEO audit before you commit to a launch date, or compare our SEO packages for ongoing support once the new site is live.