Content & SEO Migration Checklist

A step-by-step guide to migrate your website content, SEO metadata, and analytics configuration correctly during a redesign or platform switch, preserving rankings and performance post-launch.

Most traffic losses after a redesign come from three mistakes: lost redirects, lost metadata and a blocked robots file. Work through this list before launch, then work through the last section again on launch day.

Before you change anything

• Crawl the current site and save the full URL inventory.
• Export every URL from Google Search Console with clicks in the last 12 months.
• Export the current titles, meta descriptions, H1s and canonical tags.
• Record the current rankings for your top 50 terms.
• Record the current organic traffic, by landing page, for the last 12 months.
• Save a copy of the current sitemap and robots.txt.
• Export the current backlink profile and note which pages earn the links.

Map the old site to the new one

• Map every old URL to exactly one new URL. No many-to-one guessing on money pages.
• Redirect with 301, never 302, for permanent moves.
• Redirect to the equivalent page, not to the homepage. Homepage redirects read as soft 404s.
• Keep redirect chains to one hop.
• Decide what happens to pages you retire: redirect, or return 410.
• Preserve the URL of any page that earns backlinks, unless you have a strong reason.

Carry the content across

• Move the full body copy, not a summary. Thin pages lose rankings.
• Carry titles and meta descriptions across, or improve them deliberately.
• Keep one H1 per page and preserve the heading hierarchy.
• Carry image alt text across. Do not ship empty alt on content images.
• Update internal links to point at the new URLs directly, not through redirects.
• Carry structured data across, and revalidate it on the new templates.
• Preserve publication dates and author attribution on articles.

Technical setup on the new site

• Emit a self-referencing canonical tag on every page.
• Pick one trailing-slash policy and apply it to links, canonicals and the sitemap.
• Serve one hostname. Redirect the others, www and non-www, in one hop.
• Generate a new XML sitemap containing only live, indexable URLs.
• Reference the sitemap from robots.txt.
• Confirm hreflang tags are correct if the site serves several languages.
• Confirm pagination and faceted URLs are not creating duplicate content.

Launch day

• Remove the staging noindex tag. This is the single most common launch failure.
• Confirm robots.txt does not disallow the whole site.
• Crawl the live site and fix every 404 and every redirect chain.
• Submit the new sitemap in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
• Confirm analytics and consent tools fire on the new templates.
• Confirm the SSL certificate covers every hostname you serve.

The first month after launch

• Check Search Console coverage reports weekly for new errors.
• Compare landing page traffic against the pre-launch baseline you saved.
• Watch Core Web Vitals in field data, not only in the lab.
• Re-crawl monthly to catch links that rot as editors add content.
• Expect a short ranking dip. Investigate if it lasts beyond four to six weeks.