Website Migration Without Losing SEO: A Step-by-Step Checklist

Migrations are one of the most common causes of sudden traffic drops. Most of the damage is avoidable with planning.

Before launch

1. Crawl the current site and export every URL
2. Identify pages with traffic, rankings and backlinks
3. Map every old URL to its new equivalent
4. Keep or improve content on valuable pages
5. Copy over titles, meta descriptions and structured data
6. Block the staging site from search engines

At launch

1. Set up 301 redirects from old to new URLs
2. Remove the noindex from the new site
3. Submit the new XML sitemap in Search Console
4. Check robots.txt, canonical tags and hreflang

After launch

Monitor Search Console for errors, test redirects, watch rankings for key pages and fix 404s quickly.

Frequently asked questions