By Zach Wennstedt, founder of Eye To Ad Media · 2026-09-29
A website migration SEO checklist covers three phases. Before launch: export 12 months of Search Console and analytics data, crawl the old site, inventory every indexed and linked URL and build a 1:1 redirect map. On launch day: deploy server-side 301 redirects, remove staging noindex rules, submit the new sitemap and crawl the live site. After launch: monitor 404s, coverage and rankings daily, then weekly.
Most migration disasters are not caused by hard problems. They are caused by one skipped step: a robots rule copied from staging, a redirect map that covered the menu pages but not the blog, an old sitemap deleted on day one. A checklist is boring. Boring is what you want on launch day.
Phase 1: before you touch anything
- Export 12 months of Search Console performance data by page and query.
- Export organic landing pages from analytics.
- Crawl the entire old site and save the results: URLs, titles, meta descriptions, canonicals, H1s, word counts, schema.
- Pull every URL with backlinks from your link tool of choice.
- Benchmark Core Web Vitals on each key template.
- Build the redirect map: every old URL to its most relevant new URL. Never dump pages on the home page. Our redirect map builder does the first pass in seconds.
- Verify the new domain or property in Search Console before launch.
Phase 2: launch day
- Deploy redirects at the server level as 301 or 308, not with JavaScript.
- Remove staging noindex tags and robots rules. Check robots.txt by hand.
- Confirm canonical tags point to new URLs, not old ones or staging.
- Submit the new XML sitemap. Keep the old one reachable for a while so Google finds redirects faster.
- For domain changes, file a Change of Address in Search Console for every variant.
- Crawl the live site and compare against the Phase 1 crawl.
Phase 3: the weeks after
- Check Search Console coverage and 404 reports daily for the first two weeks.
- Spot-check your top 50 pages: right redirect, right title, right content, indexed.
- Update internal links so they point straight at new URLs instead of through redirects.
- Ask your most important backlink sources to update their links.
- Keep redirects in place for at least a year. Google recommends that as a minimum.
The five mistakes we see most
- Redirecting everything to the home page.
- Redirect chains from older migrations stacked on new ones.
- Staging noindex shipped to production.
- Changing content and URLs at the same time with no baseline to compare against.
- Nobody assigned to watch Search Console after launch.
Planning a move? Our website migration SEO service runs this entire checklist for you, and the WordPress migration page covers the most common case. Google's own guidance is in its site move documentation.