Free SEO resource
Website migration SEO checklist
Free website migration SEO checklist with 40 checks across pre-launch, launch day and post-launch, plus an XLSX redirect mapper and a printable PDF.
Forty migration checks in three phases (pre-launch, launch day, post-launch), tickable on this page, plus an Excel redirect mapper that flags orphaned URLs and a printable PDF. The order is the argument: redirect mapping and analytics continuity come before any design decision, because a migration that loses its redirects loses years of accumulated links in an afternoon, and nothing on the new site looks broken while it happens.
- Best for
- Anyone moving a site to a new domain, platform, CMS or URL structure
- Includes
- 40 tickable checks + Excel redirect mapper + printable PDF
- Time to use
- 2 days pre-launch, 1 hour launch day, 30 minutes weekly for 8 weeks
Free to download and use in your own client work. No email address required.
A site migration is one deployment that can undo years of SEO work. The damage isn’t from the move itself. It is from the three things people skip: redirect mapping, analytics continuity, and the post-launch monitoring that catches problems while they are still fixable.
I migrated this site from WordPress to Astro. Every check below is something I either did or wish I had done sooner.
The checklist
Tick these here (progress saves in your browser), or take the PDF for a printout.
Pre-launch: redirect mapping 8
Pre-launch: content and analytics 8
Pre-launch: technical 7
Launch day 6
Post-launch: 8-week monitoring 8
The three phases, and why the order matters
Most migration guides list everything in one block. That is unhelpful because work done on launch day that should have been done two weeks earlier is the cause of most migration failures.
Phase 1: Pre-launch (2+ weeks before). This is where the migration is won or lost. Redirect mapping, content audit, analytics setup, staging-site crawl. If you skip this phase and go straight to launch, you are gambling that nothing important will break, and you will not know whether it did.
Phase 2: Launch day. Short and mechanical if phase 1 was thorough. Deploy, verify redirects with a sample, confirm analytics, submit the new sitemap, request indexing for your top 20 pages.
Phase 3: Post-launch (8 weeks). Monitor indexed page count in Search Console weekly. A drop in the first week is normal. A drop that continues into week three isn’t, and that is when most people stop checking.
The redirect mapper
The Excel workbook has four columns that do most of the work:
Preview of the file
Prioritise URLs with backlinks. A page with links pointing at it is the only page where a broken redirect costs something irreplaceable. Export your backlink profile from Ahrefs or Search Console, match it against your old URLs, and those are the rows you verify first.
Never redirect everything to the homepage
This is the single most common migration mistake and the most expensive. Google largely ignores a redirect to an irrelevant page. A homepage sweep throws away every inbound link the site ever earned, and there is no error message. If no equivalent page exists on the new site, let the old URL 404 honestly. A 404 isn’t a penalty. A misleading redirect is worse.
What actually goes wrong
The one-hop rule
Every redirect should be a single 301 from the old URL to the new URL. No chains. No intermediate stops. No temporary 302s that you plan to change later (you will forget).
A redirect chain (old URL redirects to URL B, which redirects to URL C) loses a small amount of link equity at each hop and slows crawling. More importantly, chains are fragile: remove any intermediate step and the chain breaks silently.
When I migrated this site, I wrote the redirect map as a flat _redirects file (Cloudflare Pages
format) where every line is one hop from old path to new path. First match wins. No logic, no
conditions, no room for a chain to form.
Platform-specific notes
| Migration type | What to know | Tool or method |
|---|---|---|
| WordPress to WordPress | Redirect mapping is the whole job. Export posts and pages, map old slugs to new slugs, add 301s in .htaccess or a redirect plugin. | Redirection plugin (free) or .htaccess |
| WordPress to Astro/static | Export all URLs from the sitemap, map to the new Astro routes, add redirects in _redirects (Cloudflare/Netlify) or vercel.json. No database, so URLs must be mapped manually. | _redirects file or platform config |
| Shopify to Shopify | Shopify handles /products/ and /collections/ paths automatically. Custom pages and blog posts need manual URL redirects in Settings > Navigation > URL Redirects. | Shopify URL Redirects (built-in) |
| Domain change (any CMS) | The hardest migration. 301 every path on the old domain to the same path on the new one, keep the old domain live for at least 12 months, and update Search Console. | Server-level redirects + Search Console Change of Address |
| HTTP to HTTPS | Not optional. Redirect every HTTP URL to HTTPS in a single hop. Update canonical tags, sitemap, and internal links. Check for mixed content warnings. | Server config or CDN settings |
For what each of the tools mentioned here costs and where it stops, the SEO tools directory carries the verified pricing with the date it was checked.
When to expect recovery
Set expectations before the migration, not after.
A clean migration (all redirects in place, no content changes, same domain) typically recovers to pre-migration traffic within two to four weeks. A migration that also changes the domain, drops pages, or restructures URLs takes longer, sometimes three to six months, and “recovery” may mean a different traffic level than before, because the new structure surfaces different queries.
The metric to watch is indexed page count
Traffic fluctuation in the first two weeks is noise. Indexed page count is the signal. If the number of indexed pages in Search Console is falling after week two, something structural is wrong: a redirect is broken, robots.txt is blocking the new URLs, or a noindex tag survived from staging. Fix the cause, not the symptom.
Where this fits
This is the migration-specific companion to the wider technical SEO checklist. Run that checklist against the new site after the migration is stable. If you are also restructuring your content during the move, run a content audit first so you know which pages are worth redirecting and which can 404 honestly.