Website Migration SEO Checklist: Keep Your Rankings

A website migration SEO checklist comes down to one rule: every old URL that has traffic, links or rankings must permanently redirect, in one hop, to its closest equivalent on the new site, and Google must be able to crawl and index those new pages from day one. Most ranking losses after a migration trace back to missing redirects, leftover noindex or robots.txt blocks from staging, or content and metadata that did not make the move.

This guide is for e-commerce and marketing teams planning a platform change, a domain move, a URL restructure or a redesign on any CMS. You'll get a way to size the risk, the full checklist split into before, during and after launch, the redirect rules Google publishes, platform notes for Shopify, WooCommerce and WordPress, and a grid for diagnosing a drop if one happens.

What type of migration are you running?

The risk, and several steps, depend on what is changing. Many projects combine types, such as a replatform with a redesign and new URLs, which multiplies the risk. Change as few things at once as you can, so that if traffic drops you can tell why.

Google's guidance also covers timing. For small and medium sites, it recommends moving all URLs at once, which helps Google detect the move and update its index faster. Large sites can move one section at a time, starting with a section that changes infrequently, which makes problems easier to spot and fix.

How much traffic is at risk?

Before you plan the work, put a number on what you are protecting. Pull organic sessions, conversion rate and average order value for the last 12 months, then model what a temporary drop would cost. Here is an illustrative store with 40,000 organic sessions a month, a 2% conversion rate and an $80 average order value, which is $64,000 a month in organic revenue.

A 25% drop that lasts three months costs this store $48,000. That figure is the business case for spending time on the redirect map, a staging review and post-launch monitoring, and it is the number to share with anyone pushing to launch early or during peak season. It also tells you which pages deserve the most care: the URLs that produce most of that revenue.

Before launch: benchmark and redirect map

1. Benchmark the current site

• Crawl the old site and save every URL with its status code, title, meta description, H1, canonical and structured data.
• Export at least 12 months of Search Console data by page and query, plus revenue by landing page from GA4, so you know which URLs matter most and have a baseline to compare against.
• Export pages with external backlinks from your link tool of choice.
• Check the current sitemap with the XML Sitemap Checker so you have a clean list of what should be indexed.
• Record current rankings for your most valuable queries so you can track them through the move.

2. Build the URL redirect map

Google's site move documentation says to map each old URL to its new URL and to find old URLs from several places: sitemaps, server logs, analytics and your CMS. It also says to include images, videos, JavaScript and CSS files.

• List every old URL in a spreadsheet with its new destination. Combine your crawl, Search Console, analytics and backlink exports so pages with no internal links still get mapped.
• Redirect to the closest equivalent. Google warns that sending many old URLs to an irrelevant destination, such as the new homepage, can be treated as a soft 404.
• If several old pages are merged into one new page, redirecting them all to that page is fine.
• For retired pages with no equivalent, decide deliberately between a redirect to a close substitute and a 404 or 410.
• Update old redirect rules so they point straight to the new final URL instead of adding a hop.

Before launch: content, staging and testing

3. Carry content and metadata across

• Move titles, meta descriptions, H1s, body copy, image alt text and structured data for every page that ranks. Bulk imports and template rebuilds are where these quietly go missing.
• Keep category intro copy, product descriptions, FAQs and reviews. Losing them is one of the most common reasons a redesigned page falls even when the URL is unchanged.
• Rebuild internal links to point directly at new URLs instead of relying on redirects.
• If you use hreflang, update the annotations to the new URLs.

4. Prepare and test staging

• Keep staging out of Google with password protection or noindex, and write down exactly what you added so it can be removed at launch.
• Test the redirect map on staging with a sample that covers every template: products, categories, blog posts, landing pages and old campaign URLs.
• Compare staging templates with the benchmark crawl for missing copy, headings, schema and internal links.
• Check that the new robots.txt blocks only what you want blocked. If you don't have a robots.txt, Google says the file should return a proper 404.
• Make sure the server can take extra load. Google notes it crawls the new site more heavily than usual right after a move.

Launch day: the migration checklist

1. Deploy server-side permanent redirects. Use 301 or 308 redirects. Verify a sample of high-value URLs with the Redirect Checker, looking for chains, loops and anything returning a 302.
2. Remove staging blocks. Confirm robots.txt allows crawling and that no staging noindex tags or password protection remain. Test with the Robots.txt Tester.
3. Check canonicals. Each new page should have a self-referencing canonical pointing to the new URL, not the old URL or the staging domain.
4. Verify both sites in Search Console. Google says to verify the old and new properties, including all variants such as www and non-www, and to re-upload any disavow file to the new property.
5. Submit the new sitemap. Submitting the old and new sitemaps together during the move lets you track indexing. Redirect warnings on the old sitemap are expected.
6. File a Change of Address if you moved domains or subdomains, for every verified variant of the old domain. Google says it is not needed for HTTPS, www or path-only changes.
7. Update references you control: product feeds such as Google Merchant Center, ad final URLs, email templates, social profiles and your highest-value backlinks.
8. Spot-check by hand. Open your top 20 revenue URLs from the old site in a browser and confirm each lands on the right page in one hop.

The redirect rules Google publishes

Redirects carry most of the SEO weight in a migration, and Google's documentation is unusually specific about them. These are the numbers worth knowing.

Google's site move guide says 301 and other permanent redirects don't cause a loss in PageRank. It advises redirecting straight to the final destination; if a chain is unavoidable, keep it low, ideally no more than 3 hops and fewer than 5, even though Googlebot can follow up to 10. Keep redirects for as long as possible, generally at least one year, and consider keeping them indefinitely. If you use the Change of Address tool, Google forwards signals for 180 days and asks you to keep redirects for at least that long.

Our guide to redirect chains covers how to find and flatten chains left behind by earlier site changes.

After launch: monitoring and fixes

• Watch 404s daily for the first weeks. Check Search Console's Page indexing report and your server logs, then map missed URLs with the 404 Redirect Helper.
• Recrawl the new site and compare titles, H1s, canonicals and status codes against your benchmark crawl.
• Run the Internal Link Checker to find links still pointing at old URLs.
• Compare performance by page against the same period before launch with the GSC Performance Comparison tool, and track your saved query list weekly.
• Watch the Sitemaps report. Once the new URLs are indexed, Google says you can remove the old sitemap.
• Keep redirects in place. On an e-commerce site with backlinks to old product and category URLs, there is little reason to ever remove them.

Expect some movement. Google says it can take a few weeks or more for a medium-sized site's new URLs to replace the old ones in results, and larger sites take longer. A drop that is still deepening after several weeks usually points to a specific problem, not a normal settling period.

Platform notes: Shopify, WooCommerce, WordPress

Every platform has its own URL patterns and redirect tools, and the redirect map has to match them.

Moving to Shopify from another platform almost always changes most URLs, because Shopify's paths are fixed. Our Shopify SEO migration guide covers that process step by step, including the redirect import and the theme checks. For WooCommerce, the product and category bases are set under Settings, then Permalinks in the WordPress dashboard, so decide on them before you build the redirect map, not after.

Common migration mistakes and fixes

If traffic falls after launch, work through this grid before assuming it is a normal dip.

Two mistakes don't show up in any report: changing domain, platform, URLs and design all at once, which makes a drop hard to diagnose, and launching during your peak season. For a broader post-launch check, our technical SEO audit checklist covers crawling, indexing and site structure.

Plan the move before you build

A migration goes well when the redirect map, the content inventory and the monitoring plan exist before the first template is built. Size the revenue at risk, map every URL that matters, test on staging, launch with permanent single-hop redirects and watch your top pages daily for the first few weeks.

If you're replatforming, our web design team builds on Shopify, WooCommerce and WordPress, and our technical SEO team can review your redirect map and launch plan. When you're ready, contact us.