Website migration checklist
Start to finish, a checklist of everything you need to remember when migrating a website, whether your changing content, URLs or going for a full-blown redesign.
1. Planning
Checklist
Define the scope of changes
Establish what is changing, e.g. design, site architecture, internal linking, content, URLs.
Identify concerns and issues
Make sure everyone understands the potential downside of the risk.
Define SEO requirements
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
Establish priority pages for monitoring
Schedule time for a developer to fix urgent SEO issues post-launch.
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 tasks
Set timelines for when the project will be delivered
Common stages in a redesign and migration project would include:
- Wireframing/design
- Development
- SEO testing
- Development issue fixing and amends
- Going live
- Performance monitoring
Migration planning tools
Migration planning questions
By doing that, if something does go wrong, you can better isolate the cause.
2. Pre-migration prep
Checklist
Audit the development site
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.
Collect all URLs that need redirecting
You need to set up 301 redirects for all important URLs, including HTML pages, PDFs, and imagery. Collect these from:
Create a 301 redirect plan
Test redirects are working in staging
Implement a site monitoring system
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.
Implement a performance monitoring system
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.
Make copies of XML sitemaps containing old URLs to leave uploaded
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.
Find the best time to launch
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.
Update URLs in other places
- Facebook Ads
- Google Ads
- Display Ads
- Feed updates
- Newsletter templates
- Transactional emails
- Social media accounts
Prepare paid strategy to compensate a drop
If you can't miss revenue targets, prepare to compensate for a temporary drop in organic traffic with PPC activity.
Ensure all critical issues are corrected before launch
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.
As the SEO on the project, you need to clearly state your opinion on whether it's risky to go ahead with the migration based upon your evaluation of the staging site.
Pre-migration tools
Pre-migration questions
In addition, these step ensures minimal issues and amends once you’ve gone live with the changes.
However, I would advise removing these URLs from the site before the migration to minimise the number of changes you’re making in one go.
For example, I generally wouldn’t rewrite content for all categories on an ecommerce store at the same time as redesigning. Either make these changes before migrating and measure them or migrate, leave it a few weeks for things to settle, then make more changes.
3. Going live / post-launch
Checklist
Audit the live site
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 correctly
Check redirects are working as expected. For example, you are using 301 redirects, and they do not go through a chain.
Monitor site performance
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.
Monitor technical SEO issues
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.
Create an action plan for any issues
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.
Going live / post-launch tools
Special thanks to Ahrefs
Big thanks to Ahrefs for sponsoring our migration checklist.
Ahrefs is a leader in the all-in-one SEO tool space, becoming renowned by SEOs for providing intuitive software backed by big data.
With Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, you can now get free data on your sites:
- Technical SEO issues
- Backlink data
- Ranking keywords
You can try Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free — permanently — using the link below.