Website Migration SEO Checklist

# Website Migration SEO Checklist

A website migration, whether it is a redesign, a platform change, or a URL structure change, is one of the highest-risk moments for a site’s search visibility. Most ranking losses from migrations are avoidable with the right checklist.

## Before the Migration

– Crawl and document every existing URL, its rankings, and its traffic, so there is a clear before-picture to compare against
– Build a complete redirect map from every old URL to its new equivalent, not just the pages that seem important
– Confirm the new site’s technical fundamentals: robots.txt, sitemap, canonical tags, and page speed are all in good shape before launch

## During the Migration

– Launch redirects at the same time as the new site, not days or weeks later
– Update the XML sitemap to reflect the new URLs and submit it in Search Console immediately after launch
– Avoid launching during a period when close monitoring will not be possible

## After the Migration

– Monitor Search Console daily for the first few weeks: indexing status, crawl errors, and any sudden ranking drops
– Check that redirects are actually working, not chaining through multiple hops or leading to error pages
– Compare rankings and traffic against the pre-migration baseline to catch problems early

## The Most Common Migration Mistake

Missing redirects. A single unredirected page that had real rankings and traffic can lose everything it built, and losses across many pages compound fast. A complete redirect map, checked twice, is the single highest-value step in the whole process.

## Next Step

If a migration is coming up, [get in touch](/technical-seo-services/) before launch, not after something breaks.