The Website Migration Checklist (88 Steps + Free Template)

6 Steps to Get AI to Recommend Your Brand

A website migration is one of the highest-risk digital projects you can run.

It doesn’t just affect traffic. It can derail product timelines, kill marketing momentum, and cost teams months of progress if the foundation isn’t solid.

I’ve been brought into migrations just weeks before launch — after budgets are gone, teams are burned out, and leadership is asking:

“Why isn’t the new site working?”

In almost every case, the warning signs were there:

Here’s what happened to one brand that skipped the planning phase:

Their new site went live. Traffic tanked. And it took months to recover.

This guide will help you avoid that outcome.

In this guide, you’ll:

Download the Checklist

We teamed up with Spaced Digital and Edwin Romero to create a website migration checklist that provides an exhaustive list of items to review during your migration.

And you can follow along by downloading the free checklist below.

[Download the Website Migration Checklist](/content/website-migration-checklist# "Quick subscribe before opening"/index.html)

(While the spreadsheet contains a larger list of checks to perform, I’ve highlighted the areas that commonly cause webmasters the most issues.)

Types of Website Migrations

It’s important to note that the term “migration” applies to various projects. To get the most out of this checklist, identify the specific type of migration you’re undertaking.

Let’s look at the most common types.

Moving to a New Website Platform

You may want to migrate from your current content management system (CMS) or site technology to another. For example, you might be moving from:

Our checklist is tailored for this high-effort process.

Rebranding or Redesign Web Assets

A rebrand or redesign changes your website’s visual aesthetics and identity. Like updating the header or footer, or changing the color scheme.

But it may not impact its infrastructure (i.e., the code or CMS of the site), depending on your brand goals.

Changing Domain Names

Changing domain names affects your URLs and requires redirects.

But it may not alter the site’s infrastructure or design.

Updating Site Taxonomy

You may reclassify content on your site (like moving posts to new categories), requiring portions to be moved to new locations.

This will require redirects, but only on those categories (i.e., not sitewide like a domain migration).

Merging or Consolidating Domains

When brands acquire other websites, they often merge or consolidate the domains. This requires redirects and adjustments to the site’s taxonomy based on page overlap or gaps.

For example, the below redirect was toggled because sneaker retailer JimmyJazz was acquired by Snipes USA.

Identifying Risks

Before making a start on your website migration, it’s crucial to assess the potential risks to your organic search efforts.

To understand these risks, ask yourself (or your team) the following questions:

Is There Enough SEO Investment to Support the Effort?

Sufficient funding allows for proper SEO during migration. Without it, you can’t optimize the new website effectively.

When Will SEO Begin Playing a Part in the Project?

Understanding when SEO resources will be available will help you plan better.

Especially considering how developers push code—whether through sprints or agile methods.

Ideally, SEO should start playing a role early in the project timeline.

Is There an SEO Strategy Guiding the Project?

SEO isn’t something that can just be sprinkled onto a website.

It requires understanding user needs and website goals. Then, bridge the gap between them.

That’s why you need an [SEO strategy](/content/seo-strategy "How to Create an Effective SEO Strategy"/index.html) with measurable goals, like traffic or search engine ranking targets.

How Is SEO Testing Performed?

Validate the website’s alignment with these organic search requirements through effective SEO testing.

This requires resources and investment in SEO-specific quality assurance and (re)development.

Planning and Scoping a Website Migration

After assessing risks, focus on your migration project goals.

Clear goals help you determine SEO’s role and where it can support the project.

Build Requirements Around SEO Features

As an SEO expert, define best practices for optimizing the new site. You can translate these into detailed SEO developer tickets.

Each ticket should outline specific SEO features to implement.

Expert tip: When setting requirements, consider the limitations of your CMS. Some optimizations, like URLs, may be native to the platform, while others, like [schema markup](/content/schema-markup-guide "Schema Markup 101: Boost Your SEO & Improve Search"/index.html), might require custom development and significant effort.

Understand Who the Website Migration Stakeholders Are

Advancing a website’s SEO often involves connecting with the right people.

It’s crucial to know the key stakeholders to push SEO forward. It could be a developer who can build a feature, a project manager who can prioritize SEO, or an executive who can invest in it.

Assess a Timeline of the Migration

Getting a sense of the website migration timeline will allow you to plan accordingly.

The more time you have, the more you’ll be able to pivot based on opportunities and challenges that arise.

The less time you have, the more difficult it is to optimize a new website before launch day.

Start Benchmarking

Benchmark data and key performance indicators (KPIs) are crucial for measuring SEO performance before and after a migration.

Here are a few important areas to start benchmarking:

Track Target Keywords and KPIs

Tracking key metrics lets you spot and address issues immediately upon launch. Ensuring the migration doesn’t harm your site’s visibility and that your SEO efforts are effective.

Notable KPIs to track include:

Further reading: [10 Important SEO Metrics to Track](/content/hub/seo/metrics "10 Important SEO Metrics to Track"/index.html)

Identify Priority Pages

Identifying your site’s most impactful pages at the start lets you tailor your SEO strategy around them. Reducing the risk of these crucial pages being deprioritized.

You can do this by reviewing top-performing pages in Google Analytics, [Google Search Console](/content/google-search-console "Google Search Console: The Definitive Guide"/index.html), or by pulling top organic pages from an SEO tool like Semrush’s Organic Research.

Build a Benchmark Report

With key metrics and priority pages identified, you can now consolidate your data into a report to track during your website migration launch.

You can do this efficiently with a data aggregation tool like Looker Studio.

These tools allow you to integrate data from various sources, automatically pulling it over time with minimal effort. Making it easy to keep track of key metrics after the migration.

Perform a Site Crawl

To ensure you account for all necessary pages in a website migration, you need to perform a thorough site crawl of your internal links and [XML sitemaps](/content/hub/seo/sitemaps "Sitemap: What Is It & Why Your Website Needs One"/index.html).

Tools like Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, Semrush, or Ahrefs can gather all accessible site pages.

Since website migrations often require redirects, the crawl data will be a crucial reference for double-checking those redirects.

The crawl also provides a snapshot of your website’s metadata, [canonicals](/content/canonical-url-guide "Canonical URLs: A Comprehensive Guide for SEOs"/index.html), and URLs, helping you understand any performance shifts post-migration.

Expert Tip: After completing your site crawl, export it to a spreadsheet and categorize each URL by page type (e.g., Blog Posts, Products, Services, and Categories). This approach lets you tackle tasks in batches, improving productivity and focus.

Assess the Level of Effort

By now, you should understand your migration goals and the assets involved.

Your next step? Evaluate the work needed to make your new site SEO-friendly and risk-free (as much as possible).

Remember, every project is different.

But here’s a crucial tip:

If you’re short on SEO resources, speak up early.

This gives stakeholders time to allocate more resources or adjust the strategy.

Back Up the Existing Website

Back up your current website before launch.

This is crucial if you need to revert the migration.

Crawl your site too. It saves a snapshot of your SEO elements.

Why?

You might find your old optimizations worked better than the new ones.

Building the New Website

At this stage, you’ll be reviewing the site for SEO best practices alongside the site build.

Let’s go through the key items you need to check.

Gain Access to the Staging Site

As the SEO expert, you need to gain access to the site being built, typically in a “development” or “staging” environment. This access lets you monitor development progress and accurately report issues as they arise.

To gain access, you’ll need to collaborate with your development or project management teams.

Side note: The development and staging sites should be inaccessible to the general public and search engines. To ensure this, use password protection. For added security, you can layer in whitelisted IP addresses and apply noindex tags.

Crawl the Staging Site

With access to the staging site, you can now review its current state against SEO best practices. This involves crawling, extracting, and assessing various SEO elements, including:

We’ll walk through some of these elements in more detail shortly.

Expert tip: SEOs can emulate search engines, like Googlebot, with a crawler such as Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, or Semrush. Be sure to see what Google sees in your crawl by emulating the Googlebot user-agent specifically.

Create New URL Structures

Optimizing URL structures is one of the first steps of the actual migration. Most platforms offer foundational URL settings out-of-the-box, making the process fairly straightforward.

But understanding your current URL structure and any limitations is crucial:

Start with URL structures as they impact your redirect strategy—which is a significant part of migration.

Depending on your industry, you may want more robust optimizations (e.g., faceted URLs within ecommerce sites).

Side note: Not all brands choose to update URL structures for a new site (especially if it’s just a domain name change). Consider if this is necessary, along with a redirect strategy.

Build a Redirect Map

An accurate and optimized redirect map ensures that page authority is effectively transferred from the old webpage to the new one.

This can increase the chances of the new page ranking well in search results (although it’s not the only factor involved).

At this stage of the migration project, you’ve collected the top-performing URLs from the previous site and established the URL structure for the new site.

The next step is to build a bridge between the two through redirects.

A Note on Status Codes

Status codes are signals sent to search engines, indicating the status of a webpage.

Different statuses require different codes.

You use a 301 permanent redirect when a page has permanently moved, making it the most common status during a website migration. It tells search engines that the page has permanently changed, and can ensure authority is transferred to the new URL.

Conversely, a 302 temporary redirect signals to search engines that a page has moved temporarily and may not transfer all the authority.

Using the correct status code is crucial for site performance post-launch.

Understand the Redirect Logic

Redirect mapping can be the most labor-intensive part of a migration, as every CMS handles redirect logic differently.

Some require the new/final URLs for each webpage, while others use an identifier (ID) to manage redirects.

You might need to upload redirects individually through a dashboard, in bulk using a spreadsheet, or even directly through the htaccess file.

Common Redirect Best Practices

Your redirect strategy will be tailored to your specific needs, but here are a few common things to consider:

Create a Metadata Strategy

After redirects, I’ve found that metadata—specifically page titles and meta descriptions—often has the biggest impact on performance when launching a new website.

You should therefore understand how these elements will be handled during the launch.

Consider whether the project would benefit from revisiting large-scale custom metadata, applying programmatic solutions, or using a combination of both (which is common).

Review Your Canonical Tag Structure

A canonical tag guides search engines to the preferred version of a webpage. If omitted or incorrectly implemented, it can negatively impact site performance post-launch.

Build and Crawl Against Robots.txt

To [maximize crawl budget](/content/hub/seo/crawl-budget "What is Crawl Budget? And Why Does It Matter for SEO?"/index.html) and exclude unnecessary pages from search results, you need to build and test a robots.txt file.

Identify the pages or sections of the site you want to block, and add them to the robots.txt file.

You can apply and test your robots.txt file in a pre-launch environment using Screaming Frog’s robots.txt tester.

Optimize Your Sitemap

Communicating new URLs to search engines via an XML sitemap is an effective approach for expediting performance on new URLs.

Therefore, building and assessing the XML sitemap before launch is critical.

Review the Site’s Structured Data

Structured data provides supplemental information to search engines. And it can be super useful for helping new sites perform well.

Its importance in a website migration should be emphasized early in the project, with detailed steps and documentation supporting its implementation.

Set Up Tracking

As you’re transitioning onto a new website, various analytics platforms like Google Analytics and Google Search Console will need to be reverified upon launch.

Optimize Image URLs and Tags

Images can significantly contribute to organic performance and user experience. So be sure to optimize them in your website migration.

Image URLs

During a site migration, image URLs may change depending on how they are hosted.

Image Tags

To enhance image performance, ensure you follow alt and title tag best practices.

Track Progress Against SEO Requirements

Communication with development teams can be complex, especially when building a new site.

To improve SEO integration on the new site:

Website Migration Launch Day Checks

During a migration, the new website typically goes live during a launch call, where all team members actively monitor the process.

Crawl and Audit the New Website

Re-crawl the new site to ensure no major issues have been pushed live, specifically affecting the SEO elements you’ve outlined in your requirements.

Test URL Redirects

You’ll need to test the redirect map to ensure redirects are working properly.

Review Your Robots.txt File

As you crawl the new website, ensure that the robots.txt file is properly preventing search engines from accessing the intended locations, helping to save crawl budget.

Crawl and Submit XML Sitemaps

Crawl the XML sitemap(s) using a tool like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb to ensure they consist only of 200 status code URLs.

Indicate the Domain Name Change in GSC

If you have changed domain name, you can communicate the shift through Google Search Console’s Change of Address Tool.

Post-Migration Checks

Even after the launch is complete, there’s still work to do, especially in evaluating what’s working and what isn’t.

Review Benchmark Data and KPIs

In the long term, it’s crucial to monitor how the site’s organic visibility is affected by a significant event like a migration.

Regularly Crawl the Website

Developers and website owners regularly push changes from development to the live site to address issues, even post-launch.

Check for Site or Indexation Issues

Google Search Console should now be collecting data on your new website’s status.

Update Metadata Optimizations

Post-launch, you’ll continue to optimize your metadata as you may identify additional opportunities based on trends.

Update URL Redirects

As the site continues to stabilize, you may still need to make updates to redirects. Issues might arise due to site changes—such as URL and taxonomy updates or performance issues.

Use SEO Best Practices to Migrate Your Website with Confidence

As you move forward with your website migration, take the time to clearly define the project goals, set a realistic timeline, and review our SEO [Website Migration Checklist](/content/website-migration-checklist# "Quick subscribe before opening"/index.html) to stay on track.