A Website Migration SEO Checklist That Protects Your Rankings

A new website is exciting. A new website that loses much of its search traffic in the first month is not. Migrations are one of the most common reasons businesses see sudden drops in organic visits, and most of those drops come from avoidable mistakes: missing redirects, blocked pages or content that quietly disappeared.

This checklist covers the main SEO tasks for any migration, whether you are redesigning, moving to a new platform, changing domain or switching to HTTPS. Not every step applies to every project, but it is worth checking each one.

Before you start: planning

Agree the scope

Be clear about what is changing. A design refresh on the same URLs carries different risks from a platform move that changes every URL, or a domain change combined with a restructure. The more that changes at once, the harder it is to diagnose problems afterwards, so consider whether some changes can be staged.

Involve SEO early

SEO should be part of the brief, not a task for the week before launch. Decisions about URL structure, navigation, templates and content all affect search performance, and they are much cheaper to get right during design than to fix afterwards.

Choose a sensible launch date

Avoid your busiest trading period and avoid launching just before a weekend or holiday when the team is unavailable to fix problems.

Before launch: benchmarking

You cannot tell whether a migration went well without a clear picture of where you started. Record:

• Organic traffic, conversions and revenue by landing page from your analytics.
• Clicks, impressions and queries from Google Search Console.
• Rankings for your most important keywords.
• A full crawl of the current site, including every URL, title, meta description, heading, canonical tag and status code.
• Pages with the most external links pointing to them.

Save these somewhere safe. Once the old site is switched off, some of this information cannot be recovered.

Before launch: URL mapping and redirects

This is the most important step in most migrations.

1. List every URL worth keeping. Combine your crawl, your analytics landing pages, your Search Console pages and your most-linked pages into one list.
2. Map each old URL to its closest new equivalent. Redirect like for like wherever possible. Sending everything to the home page is a poor substitute and often treated as a soft error.
3. Use permanent (301) redirects for pages that have moved for good.
4. Avoid chains and loops. Each old URL should go directly to its final destination in one step, including any older redirects already in place.
5. Decide what to retire. Pages with no traffic, links or value can be allowed to return a not-found response, but make that a deliberate choice.

Before launch: checks on the staging site

Crawl the new site on staging and compare it against the old one. Look for:

• Missing content. Important pages, sections or copy that did not make the move.
• Titles and meta descriptions carried over or improved, not replaced with defaults.
• Heading structure that still makes sense on each template.
• Canonical tags pointing to the correct live URLs, not staging addresses.
• Internal links that point to new URLs directly rather than through redirects.
• Structured data still present and valid.
• Performance. Check Core Web Vitals on key templates against Google’s “good” thresholds: LCP within 2.5 seconds, INP within 200 milliseconds and CLS of 0.1 or less.
• Mobile experience on real devices.

Keep the staging site protected from search engines, ideally with a password, so it does not get indexed before launch.

Launch day

• Remove staging restrictions: password protection, noindex tags and any robots.txt rules that block the whole site.
• Put the redirects live and test a large sample of old URLs, starting with your most valuable pages.
• Check that the new XML sitemap is live, contains only indexable URLs and is submitted in Search Console.
• Confirm analytics and conversion tracking are firing correctly on the new site. GA4 tags and events are easy to lose in a rebuild.
• For a domain change, verify the new domain in Search Console and use the Change of Address tool.
• Crawl the live site to catch anything that behaves differently from staging.

After launch: monitoring

Some movement in rankings and traffic after a migration is normal while search engines process the changes. What matters is spotting real problems quickly. For the first few weeks:

• Check Search Console daily for crawl errors, indexing issues and sudden drops.
• Compare organic traffic and conversions by page against your benchmark.
• Monitor not-found errors and add redirects for any valuable old URLs that were missed.
• Track your priority keywords and investigate any that fall sharply.
• Ask sites that link to you heavily to update their links to the new URLs where practical.

Keep redirects in place for the long term. Removing them after a few months can undo much of the work.

Key takeaways

• Plan SEO into the migration from the start, not at the end.
• Benchmark everything before the old site disappears.
• Map every valuable old URL to its closest new equivalent with a direct 301 redirect.
• Test staging thoroughly, then remove staging restrictions on launch day.
• Monitor closely for several weeks and fix issues as they appear.

If you have a migration coming up, SEO Fleet’s website migration and technical SEO services can help you plan the redirects, check the new site before launch and monitor the results afterwards.