A new website is exciting. It’s also one of the riskiest moments for your search visibility. Every year, plenty of businesses launch a lovely new site and then watch enquiries drop, because the pages Google knew and trusted have vanished without a trace. A site migration checklist is how you avoid that.
The good news is that most migration damage is avoidable. It comes down to planning what happens to every old URL, and checking carefully before and after launch.
If you’re planning a redesign, a platform switch or a domain change this year, work through this site migration checklist with whoever is building it.
What counts as a migration?
People tend to think only of domain changes, but from an SEO point of view any of these is a migration:
- Moving to a new domain, or merging two sites into one.
- Changing platform, for example Wix or Squarespace to WordPress.
- Changing URL structure, such as /services/roofing becoming /roofing/.
- Moving from http to https, or switching between www and non-www.
- A redesign that removes, merges or rewrites lots of pages.
If URLs or content are changing, plan for it.
Your site migration checklist: planning the move
Before launch: take stock
- List every URL on the old site. Use a crawler, your sitemap and Search Console. Don’t forget PDFs, blog posts and old landing pages that still get visits.
- Find out which pages matter. Export data from Search Console and your analytics showing which pages get search clicks, traffic and conversions. Also note which pages have links from other websites. These are the pages you must not lose.
- Benchmark. Record current rankings for your key terms, organic traffic, enquiries and indexed page count. You’ll need a before picture to judge the after.
- Save a copy of the old site, or at least its page titles, descriptions and content. You’ll be surprised how often you need to refer back.
Build the redirect map
A redirect sends visitors and search engines from an old URL to a new one automatically. For permanent moves, you want a 301 redirect, which tells Google the page has moved for good and that the new URL should take its place.
The redirect map is simply a spreadsheet: old URL in one column, new URL in the other. Rules for getting it right:
- Redirect like for like. Each old page should point to the most relevant new equivalent, not to the homepage. Mass-redirecting everything to the homepage is one of the most common migration mistakes, and Google tends to treat those like missing pages.
- Avoid chains. Old page to newer page to newest page slows things down. Point straight to the final URL.
- Update old redirects too. If the old site already had redirects, make sure they now point to the new final destinations.
- Only let pages go if they have no value. If a page has no traffic, links or relevance, returning a “not found” or “gone” status can be fine. Decide deliberately.
The redirect map is the single most important document in a website migration. If nobody on your project has mentioned one, ask about it today.
Don’t lose the content that ranked
Redesigns often cut copy to make pages look cleaner. If a service page ranked well because it answered customers’ questions in detail, replacing it with three lines and an icon will likely hurt, even with a perfect redirect. Carry across page titles, headings and the substance of your best-performing content, then improve it rather than deleting it.
Timing
If your business is seasonal, avoid launching just before your busy period. A dip in April is far less painful than a dip in the week your phones should be busiest. Give yourself time to fix problems before it matters most.
On launch day
This is the part of the site migration checklist to tick off the day the new site goes live.
- Make sure the new site isn’t still blocking search engines. Staging sites are usually set to noindex, and forgetting to switch that off is painfully common.
- Check robots.txt isn’t blocking anything important.
- Test a good sample of redirects, especially your top pages.
- Submit the new XML sitemap in Search Console.
- For a domain change, use the Change of Address tool in Search Console, and keep the old domain registered and redirecting for the long term.
- Update your Google Business Profile, social profiles and key directory listings with any new URLs.
- Check analytics and conversion tracking are working on the new site.
After launch: the first few weeks
Some fluctuation after a migration is normal while Google processes the changes. How long that takes varies with the size of the site and how much has changed. The last part of the site migration checklist is spotting anything that suggests a real problem:
- Check Search Console regularly for spikes in “not found” errors and fix them with redirects.
- Watch the page indexing report for important pages dropping out.
- Compare organic traffic and enquiries with your benchmark, allowing for seasonality.
- Crawl the new site to find broken internal links still pointing at old URLs, and update them.
- Ask sites that link to you prominently to update the link, if it’s easy to do.
Get help with the move
If you’re planning a new site, our website migration service handles redirect mapping, launch checks and post-launch monitoring. It’s also built into our approach to website redesigns, so SEO isn’t an afterthought.
