Website SEO Migration Checklist

Table of Contents

Introduction to SEO Migration

What is SEO Migration?

Consider relocating to a new residence. You need to pack all your belongings up, move them carefully to a new residence, and then put everything back together at the new location…all without losing anything or breaking anything. SEO Migration is the same concept for your website.

SEO migration is the act of making major alterations to a website by either changing domain names, altering the structure of your website, or migrating to a new content management system without jeopardising your current rank in search engines or losing traffic. When a migration is managed poorly, it can lead to large drops in rankings or traffic, resulting in a loss of revenue. When executed well, however, an SEO migration is a wonderful opportunity to improve upon aspects of your structure, your speed, user experience, and search visibility.

SEO migrations are inherently sensitive processes because search engines rely so heavily on your existing structure – URLs, meta data, the internal link structure, and the actual content of your pages are indexed in a way that makes sense to Google (and search engines). By not accounting for these elements or migrating without anything in place to keep all pathways intact, your site will go from simply experiencing a migration, to becoming almost invisible overnight.

If you are redesigning your site, migrating to HTTPS, or moving from one domain to another, migration is not just a technical task. It is not something you do at the end of a project. It is something that is tactically important, and for the project, your SEO should be top of mind.

Why is SEO Migration Critical for Your Website?

During a site redesign, most organizations forget to account for SEO migration, and instead focus their energy towards graphics and enhancements. The reality is, if your SEO is not migrated appropriately, in just a matter of a few days you could lose all those precious years of hard work in building organic traffic.

Why is it such an important aspect to consider?

1. Preserve Your Search Engine Rankings – You might already have existing pages that rank well in Google, if you change any of the URLs you may lose those rankings without proper forwarding.
2. Preserve Traffic – Rankings drive traffic, if you lose your rankings you are likely to lose your visitors as well.
3. Preserve Backlink Authority – Multiple authority backlinks to your website are a major asset for SEO. If your URLs change the authority backlinks will be useless without forwarding.
4. Minimize Broken Links and Duplicate Content Penalties – Google penalizes sites with poor technical SEO. Not following proper SEO migration protocols will likely lead to broken links, missing web pages, or even create duplicate web pages – all of which are bad for performance.

An intentional migration will not only help preserve your current SEO, it can help to improve it. Done well it can even allow you to clean up old mistakes, improve usability for mobile and enhance your URL structure while improving speed.

Common Scenarios Requiring SEO Migration

Changing Domain Name

Changing your domain is one of the most daunting and, in some cases, necessary migrations. Whether you’re changing your domain for a rebranding exercise, obtaining a more desirable domain name, or consolidating multiple properties into one domain, changing your website’s domain requires an ironclad SEO plan.

When you migrate your domain name, you are basically telling search engines that your entire site has moved. Therefore, you must guarantee that all of your old URLs accurately point to the new ones. That means, setting up 301 redirects for all pages, maintaining the same structure of content (when possible), and updating your xml sitemaps, etc.

Of course, you’ll also want to alert Google of the change. When moving from one domain to another, ensure you use Google’s Change of Address tool from your Google Search Console account. It is important to communicate the address change to preserve some of the site’s SEO equity and to demonstrate to search engines that the migration is important and/or trusted.

Finally, think about how users will respond. Be sure to update all of your marketing materials, social media bios, and links to third-party sites. Moving domains is a massive change for a business’s brand identity—SEO is just a piece, but the one that can sting the most if you miss an important step.

Switching from HTTP to HTTPS

In the current web environment, security is important. For years, Google has indicated that HTTPS is a ranking signal. Changing your site from HTTP to HTTPS does improve SEO, if you do it properly.

When you do this:

• Make sure all of your internal links, canonical tags, and hreflang attributes use HTTPS.
• Setup a 301 redirect from the HTTP version of every URL to your new HTTPS version.
• Update your sitemap to include all of your URLs with HTTPS, and resubmit your sitemap to search engines.
• Make sure your SSL has been installed properly and renew it regularly.

Many would like to think of HTTP as a “checkbox.” In reality, its an technical migration, and if mismanaged, will cause duplication issues, drops in rankings for certain queries, and confusion for search engines.

Finally, ensure to test your new HTTPS site thoroughly. Mixed content errors (importing unsecured content i.e., images or scripts over an HTTPS page) can have a negative impact on the functionality, impact, and security of your site and scare your users unnecessarily with browser warnings.

Site Redesign or Platform Change

Are you redesigning your website? Perhaps you are migrating away from WordPress to the Shopify platform, or creating a new design for better user experiences? These are exciting things to accomplish, but can also present risks for SEO.

When you redesign your site:

• If feasible, maintain your existing URL structure. If not, outline your old URLs so that you can redirect properly to the new ones.
• Keep your on-page elements (the title of the pages, meta description, headers, etc.) uniform.
• As you maintain your pages and content that have been performing well. Do not throw away anything that appears to be working, unless you have to.

When migrating off your current platform:

• If applicable, pay attention to variance in the new platform’s handling of URLs, metadata, or even schema markup.
• Ensure the new platform facilitates features to enhance your SEO, like redirecting, indexing rules, content tagging, etc.

You can isolate potential SEO issues by testing everything in a staging environment prior to going on production. That allows users and Google to be hit with the potential impacts together.

URL Structure Changes

Changing your URL structure may seem like a small update, but it’s one of the most common reasons for massive SEO losses post-migration.

Let’s say you move from:

example.com/blog/post-title

to

example.com/resources/post-title

That’s a different URL. Search engines treat it as a brand-new page. If you don’t implement 301 redirects from the old to the new, your page will lose its ranking, backlinks, and traffic.

Here are some suggestions for managing modifications to your URL structure:

• Establish redirects before your site is launched—don’t wait until the site goes live.
• Change things only if you have to. If the existing structure has been working, why change it?
• Utilize tools like Screaming Frog or Ahrefs to crawl your old site and assess all of the live URLs needing to be mapped out.
• Develop a URL structure that is clean, concise, and contains keywords.

Changing your URL structures comes with an opportunity to optimize—but you need clear and thorough redirects, or Google will consider your “new” pages as orphaned pages within its ranking systems.

Pre-Migration Checklist

Conducting a Complete SEO Audit

Before you shift any content, it’s critical to understand your current site’s SEO health. A full SEO audit is the best option. It’s like receiving a full-body check-up before getting surgery.

An audit can help you:

• Define your best-performing pages
• Understand where your traffic is coming from
• Identify technical issues (slow loading speeds, mobile usability issues, and crawl errors)
• Know the keywords and content that are generating traffic
• Check your backlink profile

Use tools like Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Screaming Frog. I wouldn’t recommend relying on one tool or data set—you’ll want to cross-reference various data to get a complete picture.

You will want to export data that includes the following:

• All URLs
• Traffic stats by URL
• Keyword rankings
• Backlink data
• Crawl data

All of this data is your benchmarks. Once you are migrated, you will reference these benchmarks as your new performance indicators, to find out if traffic is increasing or to identify if you need to make changes right away.

Benchmarking Current Website Performance

Prior to conducting any substantial migration, it is vital to have a thorough understanding of the state of your website. Think of this as merely taking a “snapshot” of your site’s current SEO status for the purpose of getting a sense of what to anticipate after the migration and where to examine if something does not go as anticipated.

Begin by collecting the following performance benchmarks:

Organic Traffic: Use Google Analytics to pull traffic data segmented by landing page. Export the top 100–500 pages receiving traffic organically.

Keyword Rankings: Use a tool like SEMrush or Ahrefs to begin identifying where your best pages rank and for which keywords.

Backlink Analysis: You’ll want to get an understanding of your backlink profile. Using a tool like SEMrush or Ahrefs, identify which pages have the strongest link equity—these pages will be the priority of pages to migrate.

Identify Top Converting Pages: Identify which URLs received the most conversions (sales, leads, signups). These pages carry a high value, one you don’t want to confuse during the migration.

Measurement of Site Speed and Mobile Performance: Use Google PageSpeed Insights and/or Lighthouse to measure these performance metrics.

What is the significance of this?

After a migration, your traffic may not be stable. Without knowing your baseline performance, you will have no basis of comparison for measuring success or failure.

Moreover, this entire benchmarking process will assist you in the migration to focus your attention and prioritization of pages, as some pages are more equal than others; if you can identify your highest ranked, most trafficked, or most converted pages, you can begin by tackling those pages first.

Pro tip: Create a simple spreadsheet that contains key metrics for each of your URLs. After the migration, you can refer to this spreadsheet to view the before and after results and identify wins or losses.

Backing Up Your Website and Data

Here’s a valuable guideline when it comes to SEO migration – make a full back up, twice! It seems like a no-brainer, however, you’d be surprised how many owners go through multiple migrations without properly backing up their site and wishing they would have.

Your full backup needs to include the following:

• Website files (HTML, CSS, JS, images, uploads)
• Databases (especially if you’re on a CMS like WordPress, Magento, or Drupal)
• URL structures and internal linking structure
• SEO metadata – titles, descriptions, headers, canonical tags
• CMS Settings and Plugins
• Tracking Tools and Scripts

Your best option? Use a backup that is both manual and automated! Your host likely has a built-in automatic backup tool; however, don’t rely on a backup system only. Use a plugin or external back up system, like:

• UpdraftPlus (WordPress)
• BackupBuddy
• JetBackup (cPanel)
• Manual exports via cPanel or FTP

Why is this crucial?

If any components fail during migration, such as redirects, content, or design, reverting back to the prior site will be an option.

This also applies if you want to return to old content structures, metadata, or design layouts to diagnose SEO performance issues later.

Bonus Tip: Backup your site in two locations, your server, and elsewhere such as an external drive or cloud service (i.e. Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.). You never know when it may come in handy to restore your site’s life.

Crawling the Existing Site for All URLs

You cannot migrate anything that you can not see. Crawling your site in order to gather a list of all existing URLs is one of the most critical tasks, before migration.

Use any of these tools:

• Screaming Frog SEO Spider
• Sitebulb
• DeepCrawl
• Ahrefs Site Audit

These tools will generate a complete list of URLs, but will also provide performance data for that URL such as:

1. Page titles
2. Meta description
3. Canonical tag
4. Status codes (200, 301, 404, etc.)
5. Word counts
6. H1 tags
7. Internal links

When you have a full list of URLs and their performance data, export it to a spreadsheet and use it as your URL Master Sheet.

Why is a crawl necessary?

• You’ll use the URL Master sheet as a way to map old URLs to the new URLs. These mapping sheets are critical because they will ensure you do not leave pages out of the migration that could result in a 404 error.
• In addition to the migration mapping, it can help you identify which pages you no longer need, and which could be improved.
• You should also check for broken links or redirect chains in the crawl. If you discover old 302s in the crawl, now is a good time to change those to 301s in the new site migration.

Doing this crawl will also allow you to find existing SEO problems, such as duplicate title tags or thin content that you can fix during the migration process.

Creating a Detailed Migration Plan

A successful SEO migration necessitates more than just a backup and crossing your fingers. You should have a comprehensive, step by step detailed migration plan—like a flight path is for a pilot.

Here’s what your SEO migration plan should have in it:

Timline and Milestones

Make sure you have clear dates for:

• Final backup
• Development freeze
• Testing and QA
• Go-live
• Post-migration monitoring

Roles and Responsibilities
Make sure you have everyone clear on “who does what:”

• SEO Specialist: redirects, auditing, and metadata
• Developer: changes, redirects, and server settings
• Content Team: Content transfer and updates
• PM: Coordination and timeline adherence.

Redirect Strategy

Create a list of old URLs and their corresponding new URLs. Avoid wildcard redirections and make sure each page has its own one-to-one mapping. Use 301s rather than 302s so as to preserve the SEO value of the redirection.

Internal Linking Plan

Be sure that internal links are pointing to the new URLs. This helps crawl-ability and avoids redirect loops.

XML Sitemap and Robots.txt

Be prepared to make a sitemap change to point to the new URLs. Also make sure that the robots.txt is not blocking search engines from crawling the site.

Tracking and Analytics

Confirm you have transferred all Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and Google Search Console tracking codes to the new site, and confirm they are working.

QA and Testing

Your plan should incorporate time to test everything—redirects, broken links, page speed, and mobile usability—both before and after you launch.

A solid plan not only keeps you from making mistakes, but gives you a sense of peace. You aren’t reacting to situations, you’re implementing a system that you know works.

Mapping Old URLs to New URLs

This process is the essence of a successful SEO migration. You will not just fall in the SERPs if you don‘t do this step correctly. If you do this step properly, Google will barely flinch.

Here’s how to do it right:

1. Create a URL Mapping Sheet

Use the crawl data you exported earlier. In one column, list all your existing (old) URLs. In another column, write down the corresponding new URLs.

2. Maintain Relevance

Each old page should redirect to the most relevant new page. Don’t just point everything to the homepage—that’s a huge SEO red flag.

For Example

Old URL: /blog/seo-basics
New URL: /resources/seo-basics-guide

3. Avoid Redirect Chains

Redirect chains (A→B→C) confuse Google and slow down your site. Each redirect should take the user to the final destination directly.

4. Use 301 Redirects Only

302 redirects are temporary and do not pass link equity. Use 301 redirects to tell Google, “This page has permanently moved.”

5. Check Redirects for Errors

After you have implemented the redirects, use Screaming Frog or HTTP Status Checker to check to see if all of them are working and correctly pointing to the destinations.

Setting Up 301 Redirects Properly

The best thing to use during SEO migration is a 301 redirect so that search engines and visitors can get to valid pages on your new site instead of hitting dead ends.

Here’s the catch: 301 redirects need to be done properly to pass link equity, maintain rankings, and keep your visitors in a good user experience.

What Is a 301 Redirect?

A 301 redirect tells search engines that a page has permanently moved to a new location. It passes around 90–99% of the original page’s link juice (ranking power) to the new page.

Best Practices for Implementing 301 Redirects:

One-to-One Redirects Only

• Do not use blanket/wildcard redirects. Each original URL should point to the most relevant new page.
• Redirecting the homepage of all redirects = a bad strategy (SEO suicide).

Keep Redirect Chains to a Minimum

• Do not use chained redirects (A → B → C); use direct redirects (A → C).
• Use Screaming Frog and other tools to audit and find chains.

Update Canonical Tags

• If the new URL is canonical, make it <link rel="canonical"> and points to the correct destination.

Implement Redirects at the Server Level

• Use .htaccess for Apache or server configuration files in Nginx. CMS plugins can work, but direct server-level redirects are faster and more reliable.

Test Your Redirects

• Use HTTP status code checkers or tool like Screaming Frog to verify redirects implementation:
• The old page will be showing a 301 status
• The redirect lands exactly where it should
• No loops or errors should occur

Prioritise High-Value Pages

• Prioritising redirection of top-performing content and pages with backlinks first. These carry the most SEO weight.

Monitor for 404s Post-Migration

• Is there no redirect at all? In that case, Google would hit a 404 error and drop the page as a result. Just monitor it in Google Search Console or with another tool like the Ahrefs Site Audit.

Proper 301s redirect are your safest option. Without them, all your previous SEO efforts could vanish into thin air.

Updating Internal Links and Navigation

 

 

301 redirects are great for external users and backlinks, but internal links are another matter. If your own website links to old URLs, you’re creating a bad experience for users and search engines alike.

Why You Should Fix Internal Links:

• Crawlability: Googlebot crawls your website by following internal links. When those links are outdated, the crawl budget is being wasted on redirects or broken pages.
• User Experience: Internal links should take users directly to the new content—not through a redirected link.
• Excess Redirects: Old internal links towards an old URL may create excess redirects.

How to Update Internal Links:

Crawl All Pages After Migration

1. Utilize a full crawl of the site after migration. Screaming Frog or Sitebulb should work for this—they’ll allow you to filter out the internal links that point to 301s or broken pages.
2. Update Links in Menus, Footers, or Widgets
3. Menus and footers often have important links in a global capacity. Identify and modify those elements and then focus on the pages.
4. Search and Update Hardcoded URLs
5. URLS can be hardcoded inside your CMS, templates, or widgets. Those may not auto-update when migrating content.
6. Cautiously Use Find-and-Replace Plugins

WordPress users could use Better Search Replace and use their plugin to bulk-update the content in post url strings.

Executing the SEO Migration

It’s now time to put your plan into action. You have audited, backed up your current state, identified the mapping of your URLs, set up redirects, and tested your entire site. Everything is done, and now your website is ready to go live. This is it! This is the moment your SEO migration becomes real and begins to happen.

1. Pick the Right Day to Go Live

Don’t go live during peak times like holidays. Weekends or late at night are good times, there will be less traffic.

2. Put the Site in Maintenance Mode for a Short Time

If you are going to put the site into maintenance mode, make sure you use a 503 status code. Do NOT use 404 or 200. A 503 is a message for Google that says “we will come back.”

3. Launch Your 301 Redirects

Make sure the redirects are ready for when you go live—if it’s really close to a launch, make sure everything is released so people don’t see broken pages.

4. Check the Robots.txt file and the Meta Noindex Tags

Make sure the site is not blocking your crawlers by accident. Occasionally developers block crawlers during a staging time and then forget to take it off for the live site.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

^ That line will destroy your SEO if left active.

5. Test Everything

• Load several old URLs and verify that they redirect to the correct new URLs.
• Test your site speed and responsive layout with any mobile device.
• Verify structured data (schema markup) in Google’s Rich Results Test.

6. Update Google Search Console and Submit Sitemaps

• Present your new sitemap,
• If changing domains, use the “Change of Address” option.
• Watch crawl errors and index coverage, and check performance.

7. Immediately Monitor Analytics

Have you seen a traffic drop? Is there a spike in 404s? The sooner you can identify problems, the sooner you can resolve them and prevent significant ranking losses.

You have implemented your migration, and now it’s not a “set it and forget it” moment. It’s the start of an important monitoring period to check that your SEO holds up after the migration.

Testing Redirects and Technical Setups

 

Once the migration is completed and goes live it’s time to put on your detective hat. You need to look at every redirect, page load, and meta tag. Why? One broken link or erroneous happening could cause significant SEO headaches.

How to Test Redirects:

1. Screaming Frog or Sitebulb

• First, crawl all the old site (you saved the URLs didn’t you?) to ensure each URL redirected correctly via a 301.
• Make Sure You’re Checking for 404, 500, Redirects

2. HTTPstatus.io or Ahrefs’

• Site Audit shows you the page types in a matter of seconds — all redirects, 404s, 500s and looping.

3. Look for Redirect Loops

•  Redirect loops create infinite loops — very frustrating for users and useless for server resources. Fix this!

4. Validate Canonical Tags

• Make sure every canonical tag points to itself (or the correct URL). Duplicate content can ruin your day!

5. Check hreflang Implementation (if there are international versions)

• If you have international versions of pages, you will want to check the hreflang tags.  It ensure Google knows which pages should be associated with which regions/languages.

6. Mobile and Page Speed Test

Check you can test on Google Mobile Friendly Test or PageSpeed Insights for the core metrics.

7. Google Search Console

Lastly, monitor the crawl errors and index status. Ideally, within the first few days of the migration, if any errors address those.

Submitting New Sitemaps to Search Engines

Sitemaps are like walk-throughs for search engines in your new house. After the site is live, a key step to help all of the pages be indexed properly is to submit your new XML sitemap.

How to Submitting your Sitemap:

1. Produce a New XML Sitemap.

There are a number of ways to generated a new XML sitemap. You could use a plugin like Yoast SEO (for WordPress), Screaming frog, or your CMS could also include its own built-in tools. Whatever you decide on, helpful hints are that you will want to include all of the important indexable pages yourself, then exclude any 301s, 404s, or noindexed pages yourself.

2. Submit to Google Search Console.

Go to GSC > Index>Sitemaps. Enter the URL for your new sitemap (e.g., https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml), and then simply wait and watch for its status over the next few days.

3. Submit to Bing Webmaster Tools.

Don’t forget about Bing, Bing is the second largest search engine. Submit the sitemap there as well and you may catch some additional visibility.

4. Update robots.txt File

• Add your sitemap URL to the bottom of your

robots.txt:

5. Resubmit if Major Issues Are Fixed

If you make major changes post–launch (like fixing redirects or adding pages that needed a “404“ error), then be sure you regenerate and resubmit your sitemap.

6. Monitor Indexation

• You can use the URL Inspection Tool in GSC to request indexing for specific URLs or see their indexing status.
• Watch Google‘s speed of indexing your new pages or how slow it may be.

Monitoring Post-Migration SEO Performance

 

Once your new website is live, the work doesn’t stop. In fact, the most critical phase starts now – keeping an eye on your SEO performance, so you can immediately detect issues and ensure you are maintaining your rankings.

Consider this as the post-op care after an operation. You wouldn’t just walk out of the hospital after surgery right? Much the same logic.

What to monitor after the migration:

1.Consider traffic drops (especially organic)

• Use Google Analytics to track overall traffic trends.
• You want to segment organic traffic by landing page and compare that traffic to your pre-migration benchmarks.

2. Alerts in the Google search console:

• Set alerts for:
• Coverage issues (404s, soft 404s)
• Indexing issues
• Mobile usability issues
• Manual actions or penalty’s

Keyword Rankings

• Utilising tools such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Google Search Console, monitor the performance of your most successful keywords after your migration.
• Be on the lookout for significant ranking drops; if such drops happen suddenly, you may have broken redirects or content mismatches.

Backlink Health

• Using Ahrefs, confirm that backlinks point to live, redirected URLs.
• Try to reclaim those that are broken or outdated by reaching out to referring sites.

Crawl Errors

• Use Screaming Frog to do weekly crawls and find 404s, redirect chains, and no-indexed pages that may not have been supposed to inventoried.
• User Behavior Metrics

Monitor the following elements:

• Bounce Rate
• Time on Site
• Pages per Session

A sudden change in metrics could signify issues with user experience or broken elements within your site’s design.

When to Take Action:

• If traffic has dropped by more than 20% in the first 2–4 weeks post migration, consider conducting a full audit.
• If Google has begun to de-index pages, recheck your robots.txt file for errors, no-index tags, or sitemap errors.
• If your rankings have dropped for core pages, check redirects or keyword optimisation.

As always, these are just to help you track and monitor important metrics so you can catch small issues before disasters. Set a recurring weekly reminder to check all your important metrics each week for the first three months after the migration.

Reclaiming Lost Traffic or Rankings

 

Regardless of how well you plan your SEO migration, there may still be some decline in traffic. The most important thing is not to panic but to take action quickly and thoughtfully to get back lost ground.

A tried-and-true strategy is as follows:

1. Identify What Was Lost

• Use your benchmark data to determine which pages dropped traffic, rankings, or conversions.
• Be sure to prioritize high-traffic, high value pages first—homepage, product pages, cornerstone content.

2. Correct All Redirects

• Make sure all 301 redirects were implemented correctly.
• Make sure they are not pointing to irrelevant, or out of date, content.
• Be sure to eliminate redirect chains and loops.

3. Make Content More Relevant

• Refresh content that performed poorly.
• Increase keyword density, modify formatting, include relevant visuals, be more compelling.
• Look at competitor pages in the same space—what do they do better to rank higher?

4. Link Your Internal Links Again

• Link again to high value pages from other relevant content using internal links.
• This helps to disseminate link equity and improve visibility.

5. Update External Backlinks

• Contact sites to ask that URL’s they link to old URLs (give preference to high-authority sites) update their link to the new URL.
• Using email templates can help make updating backlinks much easier.

6. Submit to GSC for Indexing

• If some of your pages have been updated or fixed, use the URL Inspection Tool in Google Search Console to submit them for indexing.

7. Conduct a Light SEO Audit

• Using Screaming Frog or SEMrush, crawl the impacted pages.

Note if there is thin content, loading time issues, or mobile issues now exist on the pages.

If you put these action items together, you can realistically recover all or nearly all of your SEO traffic you lost (or more than you had lost).

Common Mistakes to Avoid During SEO Migration

 

SEO migration is a complicated process with significant consequences – and even minor errors can create major challenges  down the road. Here are some common pitfalls to avoid at all costs:

1. Not Bringing in SEO Experts Early

SEO is not an afterthought to apply later in the process. SEO should be part of your site migration strategy on day 1. One of the most expensive errors is not bringing in SEO experts from the very beginning.

2. Ignoring Redirects

Not setting up 301 redirects (or doing them incorrectly) can wipe out your SEO process from start to finish, and it may take you years to get it back. If you use an automated tool or a wildcard redirect, you can wonder why nothing felt right afterward.

3. Launching Without Validation

Putting a website live without checking redirects, all links, mobile responsiveness, and technical SEO is guaranteed to result in a drop in traffic — quickly and dramatically.

4. Blocking Crawlers by Mistake

If you create a ruleset like Disallow: / to your robots.txt while it’s still in staging or development, it could easily lead to search engines not indexing your entire website.

5. Changing Too Much at Once

Changing all of the design, content, structure, and URLs at once can lead to search engines not knowing what to crawl. If you can break the migration into smaller segments, it’s recommended.

6. Forgetting to Update Internal Links

Having internal links that point to old URLs wastes your crawl budget and time, and can confuse users.

7. Not Measuring AT ALL After a Migration

A perfect storm seems inevitable if you ignore what happens after the launch of your site. Measuring ultimate success (or otherwise) of your migration effort is as equally as important as the planning and execution.

If you can avoid these 7 items, you are already ahead of 80% of site owners that try to migrate a site.

Conclusion

Migration for SEO is not simply a technical decision, it is a strategy that can make or break a digital presence. There are many types of migrations, such as changing to a new domain, redesigning a website, or migrating a site from one platform to another. Each type of migration must be planned and implemented with SEO in mind.

The main takeaways are as follows:

• Start your planning early and have SEO specialists involved from the beginning.
• Backup all of your information and measure your current metrics.
• Map your URLs, implement the right 301 redirects, and modify your internal links.
• Test, monitor, and adjust your plans based on your post-migration metrics.
• Respond quickly to reclaim lost rankings and/or fix redirect errors.
• When implemented correctly, an SEO migration will not only maintain your rankings, it will maintain and increase visibility, performance, and growth for the long run.

Make it a mission to mobilise your data, while maintaining SEO.

FAQs

1. How long does it take for SEO to recover after a migration?

In general, search engines will take 1–3 months to comprehensively recognise and re-index your new site layout. However, careful planning and execution can lessen any traffic frankly dipping.

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2. Should I use 301 or 302 redirects during migration?

Always utilize 301s (permanent) redirects unless you are temporarily redirecting. 301s pass the most SEO value as well as signal to search engines that it is a permanent move.

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3. Is it normal to see a traffic drop after migrating?

Yes, a small dip in traffic is normal for the first 2–4 weeks. Major drops are an alert to immediately audit for redirect, content or indexing issues.

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4. Can I change my domain name and keep my SEO?

Absolutely, but only if you follow the correct approach. You’ll need a thorough redirect map, updated sitemaps, internal links, and you’ll want to alert Google through the Search Console Change of Address tool.

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5. How often should I update my sitemap after a migration?

Immediately update your XML sitemap after migration to reflect your new URLs. And, afterwards, update your XML sitemap anytime you add or remove pages — as a general rule, you should do this every few weeks if possible.

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