Technical SEO

Site Migration Checklist

A migration is survivable when every URL has a decided destination before design starts, content depth is preserved, and the first fortnight after launch is monitored deliberately.

In order

Before anything is designed
- a full inventory of existing URLs with their traffic
- conversions and inbound links
- and a decision for each: kept
- redirected in one hop to the closest genuine equivalent
- deliberately retired
Chains, loops and mass redirects to the homepage are the specific patterns that cause damage.
Preserve what earns.
Pages with visibility keep their content depth rather than being trimmed to fit a new template, and internal links to them survive the restructure. Most migration losses are self-inflicted here.
Prepare the technical parity checks
- server-rendered content on key templates
- canonical and structured data behaviour
- heading structure
- analytics and Search Console configured for the new property before launch rather than after
After launch, monitor for two weeks closely and a quarter loosely.
Index coverage, crawl errors, redirect resolution, structured data validity and rankings on priority queries. The first fortnight is when a fixable problem is still cheap to fix.

Covered in SEO MigrationTechnical SEO

Frequently Asked Questions

How Much Traffic Loss Is Normal After A Migration?

A short dip while search engines reprocess is normal. A sustained drop is not: it almost always traces to unmapped URLs, lost content depth or a rendering change, all of which are preventable.

How Long Should Redirects Stay In Place?

At least a year, longer where external links point at old URLs. Removing them early discards the value of every link and bookmark still using the previous address.

What Does This Cover?

A migration is survivable when every URL has a decided destination before design starts, content depth is preserved, and the first fortnight after launch is monitored deliberately.

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Site Migration Checklist

Before anything is designed

Preserve what earns.

Prepare the technical parity checks

After launch, monitor for two weeks closely and a quarter loosely.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where this applies

Related Services

Read next

Apply this to your own situation

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Site Migration Checklist

Before anything is designed

Preserve what earns.

Prepare the technical parity checks

After launch, monitor for two weeks closely and a quarter loosely.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where this applies

Related Services

Read next

Apply this to your own situation