The website migration SEO checklist we use

Nobody can promise that rankings won't move during a migration. What you can control is the process, and most traffic losses come from the same few mistakes: missing redirects, lost metadata, and pages that quietly disappeared.

Here is the checklist we run on every project, split by phase.

Before you build anything

1. 01Benchmark. Export 3 months of Search Console performance by page and query, plus organic landing pages from analytics. You'll compare against this after launch.
2. 02Crawl the live site. Every URL, status code, title, description, canonical, H1, and word count.
3. 03Merge the lists. Combine crawl, Search Console, analytics, and backlink data into one sheet. Sort by traffic and links.
4. 04Decide per URL. Keep, merge, or retire. Most sites have thin pages worth consolidating, but decide on purpose.

While you build

• Keep URLs identical wherever you can. A redirect is a fallback, not a strategy.
• Put SEO fields in the content model: title, description, Open Graph image, canonical, noindex.
• Render metadata and main content on the server. Some crawlers, including many AI crawlers, don't run JavaScript.
• Carry over structured data, then improve it: Organization, Article, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList.
• Keep image file names and alt text. Image search traffic is easy to lose and hard to notice.
• Generate the XML sitemap and robots.txt from the CMS, not by hand.

On staging

Staging must be blocked from indexing, with a password or a noindex header. Then crawl it like Google would.

• Run every row of the redirect map against staging. Each old URL should return a single 301 to a 200 page. No chains, no loops.
• Compare titles and descriptions between the old crawl and the staging crawl. Diff them in a spreadsheet.
• Check canonicals point to the production domain, not to staging.
• Look for internal links that still point at old URLs. Fix the links, don't rely on redirects.

Launch day

1. 01Remove the staging noindex. It's one of the most common launch mistakes, and a one-line fix that people forget.
2. 02Switch DNS and confirm HTTPS works on every hostname you use.
3. 03Spot-check your top 50 URLs by traffic. Status code, title, canonical, content.
4. 04Submit the new sitemap in Search Console.
5. 05Check that analytics and conversion tags fire.

The first eight weeks

Rankings rarely drop on day one. When they drop, it tends to show up in the second or third week as Google recrawls. Watch the Pages report in Search Console for rising 404s and "Crawled, currently not indexed" counts. Compare clicks per page against your benchmark every week.

Some movement is normal. A drop that keeps growing after a month usually points to a specific cause, like a section that lost its internal links or a template that lost its content. Fix the cause. Don't wait for it to recover by itself.