Technical SEO migration checklist: move your website without losing traffic

Before the move

Take an inventory of the old site

• Crawl the old website and export every URL, including images and PDFs.
• Add URLs from the XML sitemap, Google Search Console and analytics — pages can get traffic without being linked anywhere.
• Export the pages with the most traffic, conversions and backlinks. These are your priority.
• Record a benchmark: organic traffic, rankings for key queries, indexed pages.

Map every old URL to a new one

• Keep URLs the same wherever possible — the safest redirect is the one you do not need.
• Where a URL changes, map it to the most relevant new page, one to one.
• Do not redirect everything to the homepage; search engines treat it like a missing page.
• Pages you remove on purpose should return 410 or 404 — or redirect to the closest category.

Carry over what already ranks

• Titles, meta descriptions and headings of the important pages.
• The content that ranks — rewrite with care, not from scratch.
• Structured data, canonical tags and hreflang for language versions.
• Internal links to the new URLs, not through redirects.

Protect the staging site

Close the test version with a password or noindex so it does not get indexed before launch — and put a reminder in the launch plan to remove it.

Launch day

• Deploy the 301 redirects together with the new site and test a sample of old URLs, starting with the priority ones.
• Check that there are no redirect chains or loops.
• Remove noindex and staging passwords; check robots.txt.
• Verify canonical tags point to the new URLs on the live domain.
• Check analytics and conversion tracking are firing.
• Submit the new sitemap in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools; IndexNow can notify Bing about changed pages immediately.
• If the domain changes, use the Change of Address tool in Search Console.

After launch

• Watch 404 errors and crawl errors daily in the first week and fix missing redirects.
• Compare traffic and rankings with the benchmark weekly for at least one to two months. Short fluctuations are normal; a steady drop is not.
• Keep the redirects in place long term — at least a year, better permanently.
• Update the most valuable backlinks to point directly to the new URLs where you can.

The most common mistakes

• Changing URLs without a reason.
• Redirecting everything to the homepage.
• Leaving noindex from the staging site on the live site.
• Losing content, titles or structured data that ranked well.
• Forgetting images, PDFs and old language versions.
• Removing redirects a few months later.

Need help with a migration?

We plan and carry out website migrations as part of our SEO services and every redesign we build: for security, each project moves to its own VPS instead of free or shared hosting, so a careful migration is always part of the work. If you are still deciding whether to rebuild, read when a website redesign is actually worth it.