Website migration checklist

Establish what is changing, e.g. design, site architecture, internal linking, content, and URLs.

Based on the previous, identify critical things that could go wrong and create plans to prevent or minimise the risk.

Migrations are inherently risky. Make sure everyone understands what the potential risk is.

Define specific requirements for the site for critical elements that impact SEO elements, such as:

• URL structure
• Site architecture
• Page content
• Hreflang
• Pagination
• Faceted navigation
• XML sitemaps
• Structured data
• Core web vitals
• Robots.txt

These should be high traffic pages that are key to the business for revenue.

Ensure a developer has time to fix issues once the site has gone live. You should prepare developers that they may need to fix common issues like:

• Incorrect robots.txt rules
• Missing/incorrect redirects
• Broken canonicalisation
• Missing URLs within XML sitemaps

Create a plan of all tasks to be completed to ensure a smooth migration. Make it clear who is responsible for each job.

Common stages in a redesign and migration project would include:

• Wireframing/design
• Development
• SEO testing
• Development issue fixing and amends
• Going live
• Performance monitoring

Audit the site for all the standard SEO checks required, consider:

• Canonicalisation
• Indexing strategy
• Title tags / meta descriptions / H1s
• Content
• Hreflang
• XML sitemaps
• Structured data
• Core web vitals

Read my complete guide on technical SEO for pointers.

You need to set up 301 redirects for all important URLs, including HTML pages, PDFs, and imagery. Collect these from:

• A desktop or web-based site crawler
• Google Search Console Coverage/Performance reports
• Google Analytics landing pages + all pages reports
• Backlink reports from third-party tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs
• Access log files

In many cases, this requires URL to URL mapping of all old URLs to new URLs.

Crawl old URLs and check they redirect to the mapped URLs using 301 redirects without redirect chains.

To ensure you are aware of any technical SEO issues when you migrate, you can either do a manual crawl using a site auditing tool or use a tool like ContentKing, which can automatically alert you of SEO issues.

This will be required so you can monitor sessions, clicks, positions, CTR and impressions of URLs and keywords once you migrate.

Analytics tools, rank trackers, and custom reporting dashboards like Data Studio will help here.

Old XML sitemaps of indexable URLs can be left live temporarily to help with monitoring the index status for URL changes, and to help speed up crawling.

Ideally, you’ll want to launch the site on a day and time when you aren’t receiving large amounts of traffic.

Use your web analytics tool to find the most suitable time to launch.

Popular places that reference your site URLs that you control are:

• Facebook Ads
• Google Ads
• Display Ads
• Feed updates
• Newsletter templates
• Transactional emails
• Social media accounts

If you can’t miss revenue targets, prepare to compensate for a temporary drop in organic traffic with PPC activity.

At this point, feedback needs to be given on the risk of migration before it goes ahead. Showstopping issues need to be raised and the site needs a final check to ensure it matches all defined SEO requirements.

Crawl and audit the site again, check what was found in the test environment matches live.

Read my complete guide on technical SEO for pointers.

Check redirects are working as expected. For example, you are using 301 redirects, and they do not go through a chain.

Keep a close eye on performance to ensure there are no unexpected drops in traffic or conversions.

If your traffic does drop, read my guide on organic traffic drops for pointers.

Continue to monitor the site with your auditing tool of choice. Keep a close eye on the coverage report and crawl stats report in Google Search Console for any potential causes of concern.

Read my guide on organic traffic drops for pointers if your traffic does drop.

If the site does have any issues post-launch, create a clear plan highlighting causes and explain what the problem is, why it’s a problem and how to fix it.