Free resource for SEO and marketing agencies
The website migration SEO checklist.
50 checks across eight stages, from the first crawl of the old site to six weeks after launch. It's the list we work through when we rebuild a site for an agency's client, and it's yours to use on any migration.
Most migrations that lose traffic lose it for boring reasons: a redirect map with gaps, a staging noindex that went live, canonicals still pointing at the old domain, a sitemap full of redirects. None of these are hard to prevent. They just need someone to check them in the right order.
Here is the first stage in full. Leave your name and email to see the other seven on this page.
- 1
Crawl and benchmark the old site
Two to four weeks before launch
- Crawl the live site in full with Screaming Frog, Sitebulb or similar, and keep the export. It is your record of every URL, status code, title, meta description, canonical, H1 and internal link as they stood before anything changed.
- Export the top pages and queries from Search Console for the full 16 months it keeps. Clicks and impressions by page are the baseline you will judge the migration against.
- Export landing pages and conversions from analytics for the same period, so you can compare like for like after launch.
- Pull the pages with the most referring domains from Ahrefs, Semrush or Majestic. These are the URLs you cannot afford to lose.
- Record rankings for a fixed set of priority keywords, with the date.
- Note Core Web Vitals for the main templates, so a slower new build shows up as a change and not a mystery.
- Collect old URLs from every other source: XML sitemaps, server logs, paid landing pages, email campaigns, print and QR codes.
- 2
Map every URL and plan the 301s
Before the build is signed off · 7 checks
- 3
Keep metadata, structured data, canonicals and hreflang
During the build · 8 checks
- 4
Check robots and noindex on staging
Before and during testing · 5 checks
- 5
Prepare the XML sitemaps
The week before launch · 3 checks
- 6
Match analytics and tags
Before launch · 5 checks
- 7
Launch day
On the day · 7 checks
- 8
Monitor for two to six weeks
After launch · 8 checks
See all 50 checks
The rest of the list opens on this page as soon as you send the form. We'll only use your email to follow up about the checklist.
For agencies
Need the rebuild itself done properly?
We build and migrate sites for SEO and marketing agencies, under your name. You keep the client relationship, and we never contact your clients.
From £2,500 a month + VAT