Website Migration Checklist: How to Move a Site Without Losing SEO

Site migrations destroy more SEO value than Google penalties do. Not because moving is inherently risky, but because teams skip unglamorous steps: inventories, redirect maps, metadata checks. Here is the checklist we run on every migration project, in the order that prevents disasters.

Phase 1: Before touching anything

• Full crawl of the current site. Export every URL with its title, meta description, H1 and status code. This inventory is your source of truth; without it you cannot even know what you lost.
• Benchmark current performance. Search Console: export queries and pages with clicks for the last 12 months. Analytics: note your top organic landing pages. You cannot detect a regression without a baseline.
• List integrations. Forms, CRMs, pixels, chat widgets, booking tools. Each must be reconnected and tested on the new site.
• Check DNS and email. If your email runs through the old platform, plan its migration first, losing email hurts faster than losing rankings.

Phase 2: URL strategy, where SEO survives or dies

Google ranks URLs, not “websites”. The strategy has one rule with two branches:

• Keep URLs identical wherever possible. Same paths on the new platform mean zero transferred risk for those pages.
• Where URLs must change, map one-to-one 301 redirects. Old URL to the most equivalent new URL, not to the homepage. Bulk redirects to the homepage are treated as soft-404s and vaporize the transferred equity.

Never launch with a redirect map “to finish next week”. Redirects go live at the same second the new site does.

Phase 3: Content and metadata transfer

• Titles and meta descriptions copied exactly, “we will rewrite them later” later never comes, and rewrites at launch double the variables.
• Headings structure preserved (one H1, logical H2/H3).
• Images with their filenames and alt texts, image search traffic is real traffic.
• Structured data (Organization, Article, LocalBusiness, FAQ) reimplemented, not forgotten.
• Internal links updated to final URLs, no redirect chains from day one.

Phase 4: Launch discipline

• New site verified on staging against the Phase 1 inventory: every URL answered, by page or by redirect.
• Robots and indexing flags checked twice: staging must be noindex, production must NOT be. Launching with a leftover noindex is the classic self-inflicted wound.
• XML sitemap regenerated and submitted in Search Console at launch.
• DNS switch scheduled in your lowest-traffic window; old server stays live behind the scenes until the new one is verified.

Phase 5: Two weeks of monitoring

• Search Console coverage daily: watch for spikes in 404s and “crawled, not indexed”.
• Query-level comparison weekly: your Phase 1 export against current data; investigate any page down more than 20%.
• Speed check: the new site must be at least as fast as the old one, or you have introduced a new ranking headwind while removing another.

Normal turbulence versus real problems

A few days of position fluctuation after launch is normal, Google is re-crawling and revalidating. Rankings that keep sliding after two weeks mean something is wrong: usually redirect gaps, metadata losses or a speed regression. The checklist exists precisely so that, when that happens, you can diff reality against inventory instead of guessing.

Migrating from a specific builder? See the platform-specific guide: copying Tilda, Wix and Webflow sites to WordPress. Or let us run the whole move, zero-downtime launches are the default, not the premium option.