SEO Website Migration Checklist
Before you migrate anything, review the details in this post to understand what areas of your SEO a migration can impact, and how to migrate with your rankings, authority and visibility in tact.
I Migrated My Site and It Tanked. Please Find Out Why.
I've been hired by so many businesses over my career for one main reason
"I migrated my site and now it's tanked in search. Please find out why."
I've heard some version of that sentence so many times I could say it in my sleep, and I'm about to hear it a hundred more times this year, because every time a website platform jacks up its prices, a chunk of the internet bolts for whatever's trendy that week and finds out the hard way what "just moving the website" costs.
Fixing it is always harder than doing it right the first time, and slower, and a lot more expensive. I will charge you more to dig you out of a bad migration than I would have charged you to help you plan one.
How a migration impacts your SEO
Picture packing your entire shop into a U-Haul, leaving the back doors wide open, and driving off at 75 miles an hour like nothing's going to fall out. You arrive at the new site. The truck is empty. Your bestsellers are scattered across three states. Your best-performing blog post is face down in a ditch outside Little Rock, and you're standing in your shiny new storefront going, huh, weird, I definitely packed that.
That's what an unplanned migration does to your SEO. Nothing follows you unless you drag it there yourself. Not your rankings, not your metadata, not the three years it took Google to trust your URLs enough to send people to them. Google doesn't know you moved. It just knows a bunch of pages it used to trust suddenly started 404ing, and it reacts exactly the way you'd expect. Badly. It does not give a shit which platform changed the deal on you mid contract.
Need migration support?
The Hearthkeeper
Get a migration risk analysis and quote for a migration that maintains (and improves) your online presene.
Let's ChatMigration mistakes that tank your rankings
So what breaks first? Usually your redirects, because almost nobody sets them up right. Every old URL needs to point straight at its exact match on the new site, no four-stop redirect chains diluting everything along the way. Your metadata's next, because most website builders will not carry your titles and descriptions over for you, that work is just gone unless you export it yourself before you touch a single setting. Then there's your sitemap, and your robots.txt, which will straight up deindex your whole site if one box gets checked wrong, and you won't find out until the traffic's already gone.
Steal This Migration Checklist
This is the part where I'm supposed to hand you a tidy little checklist and pretend it's thrilling. Nope. It's the difference between a two week dip and a six month goddamn crater, so here it is.
Before you touch anything:
Export every URL on your current site, all of them please, not just the popular ones.
Export every title tag and meta description, since most builders won't carry these over for you
Export your image alt text too, that gets left behind just as often
Note which pages link to each other internally, so you know what you're rebuilding and fixing
Note down all connected services like Google search console, etc because these tags need to be added back so you don’t lose your data
Fix existing errors and duplicate titles before you migrate them along with everything else
Note which pages, if any, are set to noindex on purpose, so you don't lose track of why
Run a baseline performance and speed test to make sure your new template and site setup doesn’t cause performance issues which impact your SEO
While you're building the new site:
Create URLs with the exact same structure. If a previous blog post had /blog/category/post-name, the “new” post needs the exact same URL
Map every old URL to its closest match on the new site, because you can’t always recreate URLs exactly. Do not blanket dump all URLs to the homepage
Set up true 301 redirects for every mapped URL, not 302s, not meta refreshes
Rebuild your titles, descriptions, and alt text
Rebuild your internal links pointing to the new URLs instead of the old ones, since those break too
Rebuild any schema or structured data you had, like reviews, FAQs, or products
Set a canonical tag on every page so you're not fighting yourself with duplicate content
Confirm the new site runs on HTTPS with a valid certificate before launch
Reconnect your tracking codes, Analytics, Search Console verification, any pixels you rely on
Check your robots.txt before launch, and confirm nothing carried over as accidentally noindexed
Set up your new XML sitemap before you flip anything live
After you flip the switch:
Submit your new sitemap in Search Console, and in Bing Webmaster Tools too
Spot check old URLs to confirm they redirect straight to the right page, no chains
Crawl the new site and hunt down any internal links still pointing to old, dead URLs
Test your page speed and Core Web Vitals against your old scores
Check who's linking to you from other sites and ask the important ones to update the URL
Update your Google Business Profile and any directories pointing at your old URL
Watch Search Console daily for the first two weeks for crawl errors and 404 spikes
Run a new performance test, and make sure it’s the same or better than your previous scores.
Track your actual rankings on your money pages, not just overall traffic, since one can hide the other
Give it four to eight weeks before you let yourself panic
Do The Math Before You Move
If you’re thinking of saving money by doing all this yourself, you're paying for it anyway, in traffic, in the clients who used to find you and now find whoever's ranking in your old spot instead, in the months it takes to climb back to where you already were.
Don't be the ditch outside Little Rock. Pack the truck right the first time.
Need migration support?
The Hearthkeeper
Get a migration risk analysis and quote for a migration that maintains (and improves) your online presene.
Let's Chat