This website migration SEO checklist covers 28 checks in four phases: planning, staging, launch day and the weeks after go-live. Work through them in order and most of the usual traffic losses never happen.
By Kristijan GjorgjioskiIndependent SEO consultantPublished 18 October 2026 · 9 min read
A redesign can look better than the old site and still lose a big share of its search traffic within weeks.
The cause is rarely the design.
It's a missed redirect, a shortened page or a staging setting that went live with your new site.
This checklist covers the 28 checks I run on every migration, grouped into four phases.
Each one has a pass state you can confirm, so nothing gets ticked on trust.
You don't need to start at item 1 if you're joining late. Start where your project is:
The checks apply to redesigns, replatforms, domain changes and site mergers. Domain moves add one extra step, item 20.
The risk differs by type of move. A replatform carries more than a reskin, and I break those differences down on my migration planning page.
These checks decide how much your migration can lose.
Skip them and the rest of the list becomes guesswork.
Without a baseline, you can't say what the migration lost.
Export organic landing page traffic from analytics, clicks and queries per page from Search Console, rankings for your core terms and enquiries per landing page.
Pass: a dated snapshot saved somewhere the whole project team can find it.
Run a full crawl of the live site before anything changes.
Save the URL list, titles, headings, canonicals and status codes.
This becomes your record of what the old site said, page by page.
Pass: a complete crawl export stored alongside the baseline.
A crawl only finds linked pages.
Old URLs with backlinks but no menu entry are the ones you're most likely to lose.
Add URLs from Search Console, analytics landing pages, backlink exports, XML sitemaps and server logs. Google's site move guide lists similar sources for gathering old URLs.
Pass: one deduplicated master list of every old URL with value.
Every old URL needs a decision recorded next to it.
Keep pages that earn you traffic or leads.
Merge thin pages that split one topic. Retire pages with no traffic, links or purpose.
Pass: no URL on the master list without a decision.
URL patterns are cheap to change in a wireframe and expensive to change in a build.
Keep your existing URLs wherever the page carries over unchanged.
Every URL you keep is one fewer redirect that can go wrong.
Pass: the new URL pattern is signed off before templates are built.
Save a full copy of the old site, its XML sitemaps and its robots.txt file.
You'll need them if something goes wrong and you have to compare or roll back.
Pass: backups stored outside the hosting account being replaced.
This phase runs alongside the build.
Problems you find here cost an afternoon. Found after launch, they cost you rankings.
Each old URL on the master list gets one destination: the new page that best matches it.
Patterns are fine where pages really match, such as a whole blog folder moving.
Everything else is chosen by a person. My guide on how to create a redirect map walks through the spreadsheet.
Pass: every "keep" or "merge" URL has a destination.
Google's site move guide recommends server-side permanent redirects where technically possible, with 301 or 308 status codes.
JavaScript redirects and meta refreshes are weaker substitutes.
Use them only if your server gives you no choice.
Pass: the redirect method is confirmed with your developer in writing.
Old redirects from past redesigns often point at URLs that are now about to change again.
Update them so every old URL goes straight to its final destination in a single hop.
Google's guide advises avoiding chains.
Pass: no URL on the map passes through more than one redirect.
Rewrites shorten pages. Shortened pages lose rankings.
Compare titles, headings and body copy on your new templates against the old crawl.
If copy changes, you should be able to say why.
Pass: every carried-over page has a content check marked done.
New templates often ship with canonicals pointing at staging, missing hreflang or no structured data.
Check each template type.
For international sites, review the logic with my hreflang guide and the hreflang generator. Rebuild missing markup with the schema markup generator if needed.
Pass: each template outputs the right canonical, hreflang and schema.
Navigation, footers and body links should link to new URLs directly, not through redirects.
Search your content for hard-coded old links too.
They hide in buttons and old blog posts.
Pass: a staging crawl shows no internal links to redirecting URLs.
Staging should be blocked from search engines, usually with a password.
Assign one named person to remove every block on launch day.
Unowned tasks are the ones that get missed.
Pass: a name next to "remove staging blocks" on the launch plan.
Redesigns break analytics more often than they break rankings.
Check that your tags, key events and form tracking fire on the new templates.
My GA4 audit checklist lists what to test.
Pass: a test enquiry on staging appears in your analytics.
Run every old URL through the staging redirects and record the status code and destination.
Fix broken targets, loops and chains now, while they cost nothing.
Pass: every mapped URL returns one permanent redirect to a live page.
Run these on production within hours of go-live.
Staging results don't count. For the full set of crawl and indexing checks behind them, keep my technical SEO checklist open alongside this one.
Check the live site for leftover noindex tags, robots.txt disallow rules and password protection.
This is the single most damaging launch mistake I see, and the easiest to prevent.
Pass: key pages are crawlable and return no noindex directive.
Test your top pages by traffic and by backlinks on the live server.
Your live server configuration can differ from staging, so don't assume the map survived.
Pass: each tested URL returns one permanent redirect to the right page.
Load a sample of each template and read the canonical tag.
Any canonical still pointing at a staging hostname tells Google to index the wrong site. It's a template fix, so one correction usually clears every page.
Pass: every sampled canonical points at the live, preferred URL.
Google's guide says to submit the new sitemap in Search Console, which can help Google discover your new URLs faster.
List only live, indexable URLs that return a 200 status.
Pass: the sitemap shows as processed in Search Console.
If the domain or subdomain changed, submit the Change of Address in Search Console for the old property.
Google's guide says the tool is only needed for domain or subdomain moves, not HTTPS switches or path changes.
Pass: the request is submitted, or the item is marked not applicable.
Submit a real test enquiry on the live site and confirm it lands in analytics and in your inbox.
If tracking broke, your post-launch comparison is meaningless. When the fault is bigger than one tag, a GA4 audit finds it properly.
Pass: the test enquiry is visible in both places.
Google's guide says to expect temporary ranking fluctuation during a move.
These checks help you separate normal movement from real damage.
Check Search Console and server logs every day for the first weeks.
A cluster of new 404s usually means a missing redirect pattern.
Fix it the same day.
Pass: no unexplained rise in 404s on old URLs.
Track the indexed count for your new sitemap in the page indexing report.
Old URLs should drop out as new ones come in.
Money pages that stay unindexed need investigating. On very large sites, how Google spends its crawl budget can slow this down.
Pass: key new URLs show as indexed.
Compare core rankings and organic landing pages against item 1, page by page.
The pages that lost most are where you'll find the missing redirects or cut content.
Pass: every significant drop has an explanation or a fix.
Rankings can hold while your enquiries fall.
New templates move phone numbers, shorten forms and drop proof.
Pass: enquiries per landing page are back in line with the baseline, or the gap is explained.
Contact the sites behind your strongest backlinks and ask them to link to the new URLs.
Redirects pass visitors on, but a direct link removes your dependency on them.
Pass: outreach sent for your top linking pages.
Google's guide recommends keeping redirects for as long as possible, generally at least one year, and suggests considering keeping them indefinitely.
I recommend indefinitely.
Old links and bookmarks keep arriving for years.
Pass: a note in the hosting documentation that the redirects must stay.
Once the numbers stop moving, compare the new site with the baseline one last time and list anything still to recover.
On a rebuild onto new URLs that I handled, this review is where the follow-up audit work came from. You can read the hazmat storage case study for how that went.
Pass: a written comparison with a short list of remaining actions.
If launch is days away, focus on the checks that cause the biggest losses when missed:
| Priority | Checks | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Must do | 1, 3, 7, 15, 16, 17 | Baseline, URL list, redirect map and staging blocks cause most losses |
| Should do | 10, 12, 14, 18, 19, 21 | Content, internal links, tracking and canonicals |
| Do soon after | 22 to 28 | Monitoring and recovery while fixes are still cheap |
Everything else still matters.
It just matters less than these if the clock is running.
If the site has deeper problems you'd rather fix during the move, run an SEO audit first and feed its findings into the plan.
The best time to use this checklist is before the new site has a single template.
Pick items 1 to 3 and do them this week, whatever stage your project is at.
They're the checks you can't recreate after launch.
If you'd like a second pair of eyes on a relaunch, tell me what's changing and when. My SEO migration support covers planning, staging review and post-launch monitoring.
Start as soon as a redesign, replatform or domain change is agreed, ideally before the new sitemap and wireframes are signed off. The planning checks, especially the baseline and the URL inventory, take time and shape decisions about the new URL structure. Starting a fortnight before launch still helps, but it turns planning into damage control.
It varies with the size of the site and the type of move. Google's site move documentation says to expect temporary fluctuation and notes that it can take weeks or more for new URLs to replace old ones in results, longer on large sites. A well-planned move keeps the dip small; lasting losses usually point to a mistake you can find and fix.
No. Google's documentation says the Change of Address tool is only needed when moving from one domain or subdomain to another. It is not needed for a switch to HTTPS, a www change on the same domain or changes to URL paths. Redirects, sitemaps and monitoring still apply to every kind of move.
You should avoid it. Google's site move guidance warns against sending many old URLs to one unrelated page such as the new homepage. Redirect each old URL to its closest equivalent. If a page genuinely has no replacement, a relevant category page is better than the homepage, and letting a worthless page return a 404 is acceptable.
About the author
Kristijan Gjorgjioski
Independent SEO consultant · 6+ years in SEO · 60+ client websites worked on
I'm an independent SEO consultant with 6+ years in SEO. I run audits, migrations and content programmes for businesses in Europe, the UK and the USA, and I build the automation behind my own research.
Book a free 30-minute call. I look at your site first and tell you plainly what I would fix, and in what order.