Crawl and benchmark the old site
Export URLs, status codes, titles, canonicals, internal links, traffic, rankings, backlinks and conversions before anything changes.
Website migration SEO checklist
Move the website without throwing away its visibility.
A migration checklist for redesigns, domain changes, platform moves and URL restructures where existing rankings, links and customer journeys must be protected.
Browse all SEO guides01 / THE OUTCOME
A successful migration preserves the value of the old site, improves known weaknesses and gives search engines an unambiguous route from every important old URL to its best new destination.
Inventory valuable URLs before development
Create and test a one-to-one redirect map
Preserve content, metadata and internal relationships
Monitor indexing and traffic immediately after launch
02 / THE CONTEXT
The migration begins before the new design is approved
Traffic losses often happen because the new site changes URLs, removes useful content or launches with incorrect canonicals and redirects. By the time the drop appears in a report, the cause may be spread across templates and hundreds of pages.
SEO requirements must therefore enter planning early. The team needs a complete URL inventory, ownership for redirects, a controlled staging environment and a launch checklist that can stop the release when critical checks fail.
Best suited to
Website redesign projects
Domain or brand changes
Ecommerce platform moves
Businesses consolidating several websites
03 / THE WORK
The migration controls that prevent avoidable loss
Assign an owner and verification method to every control rather than leaving migration SEO as a final launch-day task.
Decide what survives
Preserve strong pages, improve weak but valuable content and retire only URLs with a clear reason. Do not delete pages because they are absent from the new navigation mock-up.
Map redirects individually
Redirect each important old URL to the closest relevant new page. Avoid sending everything to the homepage or creating multi-hop chains.
Validate staging safely
Block staging from indexation while allowing authorised crawling. Check templates, canonicals, metadata, schema, links, mobile rendering and performance.
Control the launch
Remove staging blocks from production, implement redirects, publish the correct sitemap, verify analytics and test a representative set of old and new URLs.
Monitor and repair
Watch index coverage, server errors, redirect misses, rankings, traffic and conversions daily at first. Fix patterns quickly and preserve the migration evidence.
04 / HOW WE WORKClear priorities.
Clear priorities.
Visible progress.
Diagnose
We establish the search demand, competitive gap, technical condition and business priority before recommending work.
Build
We improve the structure, page experience and content around one clear search and conversion purpose.
Prove and improve
We measure visibility and enquiry signals, strengthen what works and correct weak assumptions early.
05 / STRAIGHT ANSWERS
Questions this guide should settle.
Reviewed 15 September 2026
Will a redesign always reduce rankings?
No. Temporary movement can occur, but a controlled migration can preserve and improve visibility. Large losses usually indicate avoidable changes or technical errors.
How long should redirects remain?
Keep permanent redirects for the long term, especially where old URLs have links, bookmarks or continuing discovery. Removing them early can discard accumulated value.
Should URLs change during a redesign?
Change them only when there is a clear structural or user benefit. A visual redesign does not require new URLs.
When should Search Console be checked?
Benchmark before launch, verify ownership and sitemaps at launch, then monitor coverage, crawl and performance frequently during the following weeks.