🚀Website Migration SEO Checklist

Website migrations — changing domains, redesigning site structure, moving from HTTP to HTTPS, or switching CMS platforms — are among the highest-risk SEO events. Done wrong, they can cause 30-80% traffic drops that take months to recover from. Done right, with careful planning, organic performance is preserved and often improved.

Pre-Migration (2-4 Weeks Before)

1. Crawl your current site with a tool (Screaming Frog, Hugo) to capture all URLs, titles, and meta descriptions.
2. Export your current GSC performance data (top URLs, keywords, clicks) as a baseline.
3. Map every old URL to its new URL destination in a redirect mapping spreadsheet.
4. Build and test the new site on a staging environment with proper noindex (block from Google).
5. Set up the new GSC property for the new domain/URL structure.
6. Test all redirects work correctly on staging.

Launch Day

1. Implement all 301 redirects — every old URL → new URL.
2. Verify canonical tags on all new pages point to the correct new URLs.
3. Update XML sitemap to new URLs and submit to GSC.
4. Update robots.txt to remove staging blocks; ensure important pages are allowed.
5. Update Google Analytics to the new domain.
6. Update backlinks in your control (social profiles, directories, partner links).

Post-Migration (First 4 Weeks)

1. Monitor GSC daily: Coverage errors, Crawl stats, Performance (expect initial dip).
2. Check Search Console for crawl errors — fix any 404s from broken redirects immediately.
3. Monitor organic traffic in GA — compare week-over-week vs pre-migration baseline.
4. Use URL Inspection tool to check indexing status of priority pages.
5. Disavow toxic links if the migration involved a domain change and you inherited bad links.