Insights · Checklist
Website migration checklist (no ranking loss)
Migrations lose visibility through broken redirects, missing content and metadata left behind. This checklist covers the inventory before, the parity during and the monitoring after, so that fluctuation is brief and recovery is complete.
How to use it
Before the first step.
- Begin at least a month before the intended cutover.
- Keep the old site reachable in staging until monitoring is complete.
Steps
Each one owned and evidenced.
| # | Step | Owner | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Inventory every current URL with traffic, inbound links, citations and rankings from analytics, Search Console and citation tracking. | Technical owner | URL inventory with metrics |
| 02 | Decide for each URL: keep at the same address, move, consolidate or retire. | Editorial lead with technical owner | Disposition column |
| 03 | Build the redirect map, old to new, one hop, correct status code, including images and documents with inbound links. | Technical owner | Redirect map file |
| 04 | Carry over titles, descriptions, canonicals, structured data and hreflang for every kept or moved page. | Technical owner | Metadata parity report |
| 05 | Verify content parity: every valuable page’s content exists on the new site, or its retirement is deliberate. | Editorial lead | Parity report |
| 06 | Rebuild internal links to the new addresses; no internal link should hit a redirect. | Technical owner | Crawl report of internal links |
| 07 | Test the redirect map on staging with a crawler: every old URL resolves in one hop to the intended page. | Technical owner | Redirect test log |
| 08 | Generate new sitemaps and llms files; retain an old-URL sitemap temporarily to speed redirect discovery. | Technical owner | Sitemap set |
| 09 | Confirm crawler access, robots, headers and performance on the new site before cutover. | Technical owner | Crawl readiness checklist evidence |
| 10 | Choose a low-traffic cutover window; freeze content changes for the window. | Marketing lead | Cutover plan |
| 11 | Cut over; immediately recrawl old URLs to confirm redirects in production. | Technical owner | Production redirect test log |
| 12 | Submit new sitemaps and request indexing of key pages in Search Console and Bing. | Marketing lead | Submission records |
| 13 | Monitor daily for several weeks: crawl errors, index coverage, rankings, citations, inquiries by source. | Measurement lead | Monitoring log |
| 14 | Fix every error found and record the migration outcome against the pre-migration baseline. | Technical owner | Closure report |
By David Selakovic · Published 2026-10-16 · Revised 2026-10-16 · Reviewed every 180 days