Website redesign & migration SEO checklist

A website migration is any change that moves pages search engines already know: a redesign, a new platform, a new URL structure, or a new domain. Rankings belong to URLs and the content on them, so a migration puts them at risk whenever a page disappears, changes address without a redirect, or loses the content that earned its place. This checklist covers what to do before, during, and after the move so the new site keeps the search traffic of the old one.

What counts as a website migration

Not every migration carries the same risk. From least to most:

• A redesign on the same URLs. The addresses stay put, but templates, content, and internal links change.
• A platform change, such as WordPress or Webflow to a headless CMS. URLs often change with it, along with how pages render.
• A new URL structure, such as moving /case-studies/ to /projects/.
• A domain change, which moves every URL at once.

Many projects combine several of these. Treat each part on its own when you plan the redirects and the checks.

Before: record where you stand

You can only tell whether a migration worked if you know where you started. Before anything changes:

• Export Search Console data. Search Console keeps 16 months of performance data, but only for the property it's attached to. Save clicks and impressions by page and by query.
• Save traffic and conversions by landing page from your analytics, so you can compare page by page afterward.
• Record rankings for the keywords that matter to the business, in a rank tracker that will keep tracking after launch.
• Crawl the current site with a tool such as Screaming Frog or Ahrefs Site Audit. Keep the full list of URLs with their status codes, titles, meta descriptions, H1s, and canonical tags.
• List the pages with backlinks. Search Console's Links report and a backlink tool show which URLs other sites link to. Those links lose their value if their target stops resolving.

Then mark every page that earns traffic, links, or conversions. Those are the pages the migration has to protect.

Plan: build the redirect map

The redirect map is a spreadsheet with one row per old URL and the new URL it should point to. It is the most important document in a migration.

• Redirect each old URL to its closest equivalent, not to the homepage. Google can treat a redirect to an unrelated page as a soft 404, which passes nothing on.
• Use permanent redirects, 301 or 308. Google treats the two the same.
• Keep URLs that don't need to change. Every URL you keep is a redirect you don't need.
• Avoid chains. If old redirects already point at a page that's now moving, update them to point straight at the final URL.
• Include more than pages: PDFs, images that get search traffic, and any old URLs that still have backlinks.

When we moved pressroom.ai's case studies from /case-studies/ to /projects/, each old address got its own permanent redirect to the matching project page.

Build: keep what ranks

Most of the traffic lost in a website redesign is lost here, in decisions that look like design choices.

• Keep the content that ranks. A page that ranks for a topic needs to keep covering it. Cutting copy to fit a cleaner layout is the most common way a redesign loses traffic.
• Carry over the metadata: title tags, meta descriptions, H1s, canonical tags, image alt text, and structured data. Improve them where you can, but don't lose them.
• Point internal links at the new URLs directly, not through redirects.
• Check what search engines will see. If the new site renders with JavaScript, confirm that content, links, and metadata are in the HTML.
• Test speed on the new templates before launch, on a phone as well as a laptop.
• Install tracking on the new templates, including analytics, conversion events, and ad tags, so the before-and-after comparison is fair.
• Keep the staging site out of search. Protect it with a password or a noindex tag, and write down how it's blocked so the block comes off at launch.

Launch day

• Remove the staging block. Check robots.txt and look for leftover noindex tags. Launching with the staging site's robots.txt is one of the most common migration failures, and one of the easiest to miss.
• Deploy the redirects and test them all. Run the full list of old URLs through a crawler. Every one should return a single permanent redirect to a page that returns 200.
• Submit the new XML sitemap in Search Console.
• For a domain change, verify the new domain in Search Console and use the Change of Address tool.
• Update the links you control: your Google Business Profile, social profiles, directory listings, email signatures, and the final URLs in your Google Ads campaigns.

After: watch the first weeks

Rankings often move while search engines recrawl a migrated site. Google's own guidance is that most pages of a medium-sized site can take a few weeks to move in its index, and larger sites take longer. Watch it closely through that time:

• Check Search Console's indexing reports for new 404s, pages that fall out of the index, and redirect errors.
• Compare traffic, rankings, and conversions with your benchmark, page by page rather than only in total, so one lost page doesn't hide inside a stable average.
• Crawl the live site again to catch broken internal links and any redirect that turned into a chain.
• Reclaim backlinks that point at URLs now returning 404 by adding the redirect they're missing.
• Keep the redirects. Google recommends keeping them for as long as possible, generally at least a year. Leaving them in place for good costs nothing.

The short version

1. Record traffic, rankings, conversions, and every URL before anything changes.
2. Map every old URL to its closest new page with a permanent redirect.
3. Keep the content and metadata that rank.
4. Test every redirect and remove the staging block at launch.
5. Watch indexing and rankings against the benchmark for the first weeks.

A migration done this way usually ends with a faster, better site that keeps the search traffic it had. Our website redesign services follow this checklist on every project, and our SEO web design builds new sites the same way. If your site is already live and slipping, start with our technical SEO services.