SEO Website Migration Checklist

Migrating a website can be a daunting task. Not only is the process filled with the potential for technical trip-ups, but it also carries the burden of temporarily losing your search engine rankings – which, if not done right, you might never get back. To give you the best chance of success with your migration, we’ve created this comprehensive checklist.

A migration is any process that involves a mass-movement or amendment of pages on your site or the site as a whole. This could involve moving to a new CMS or hosting provider, redesigning the look or branding of the site, or making changes to improve site performance.

No matter what you’re doing, there’s a huge number of steps involved – so taking a step-based, systematic approach can help to cover all your bases and reduce the risk of things going wrong.

We’ve split this checklist into sections to help break down the process into manageable stages. They’re hard and tricky work, and often require the help of an SEO Agency to get it right.

Stage 1: Pre-Migration Planning

Step 1: Define Goals and Scope

Any migration should have clearly defined goals or objectives, as well as a scope of what will be migrated or transferred.

Before you start any planning, clearly define what you want to achieve through the migration. When doing this, you’ll also need to benchmark what your current performance or issue is – this creates a metric for you to compare your results to and determine how effective the migration was.

Common goals include:

• Improving Performance: Enhancing site speed and load times by replatforming.
• Upgrading CMS: Moving to a more robust or user-friendly content management system.
• Rebranding: Updating the website to reflect a new brand identity.
• Enhancing Security: Upgrading to a more secure platform or hosting provider.
• Expanding Functionality: Adding new features or integrations that the current platform does not support.

Alongside the goal definition, you also need to set the scope of your migration. Are you moving the entire site? If not, which parts are being moved, and which are staying the same? Nail down these aspects now so you can plan comprehensively for the process ahead.

Once these are done it’s also good to set a brief timeline for your migration – but keep it loose as you may find that it needs to change.

If you plan to bring in the help of third party website migration services, now is the time to do it. The earlier you incorporate them into your strategy and

Key Tip: Don’t change too much at one time. The more changes you make to your site during the migration process, the longer it will take to recover search rankings and the higher the risk of technical errors. Conduct a series of small migrations rather than one huge one – changing the site too much can leave Google unsure of what it is or what the relationship to your old site was.

 

Step 2: Conduct an Audit of the Current Site

Review the existing architecture of the site as well as the content on it. Understanding the current state of the site allows you to identify where you have the most to gain. Specifically audit the areas your migration will be oriented to improving – for instance, if you’re migrating to improve site speeds, audit current page speeds.

Key Tip: Make sure you have a full list of URLs. Use data from different sources such as a screaming frog crawl, google analytics and search console data, as well as the existing XML sitemap.

As part of this SEO audit, you also want to create a full inventory as well as your most important pages:

• Site page and asset inventory: list all URLs, images or media, and databases.
• Key site elements: take note of your most important pages and all their SEO elements.

 

Step 3: Create Backup and Staging

Backup

After your audit, create a complete backup of the site as it current exists. This may sound excessive, after all, you’re trying to move away from this iteration of the site. But this backup provides an insurance policy: if there are too many technical issues on the other side, or rankings aren’t seeing any recovering, this backup gives you a working site that you can quickly revert to.

Staging

Next, set up a staging environment for your new site. A staging site gives you a secure and controlled place to build and test your next iteration of the site. Start by setting up a replica of the existing site in the staging environment to ensure the staging set-up works. Restrict access to authorised users only using your Robots.txt file and set up access to tracking tools such as Google Analytics to staging. Ensure that the site is not indexable.

 

Stage 2: Design and Content Preparation

Step 4: Review and Clean Site Content

During the migration process it’s a smart idea to clean your site of content that is outdated, irrelevant or underperforming. Using your site audit, identify which pieces of content or pages aren’t performing well.

For all the pages you identify, there are two options:

• If the content is poor or underperforming, but it has a place on your site and there are tangible ways you can improve it, then optimise it to give it the best chance of success post-migration
• If the content is irrelevant or outdated to the purpose of your website, or it would be too time-consuming to update it to an acceptable level, you can remove it from the future of your site.

 

Step 5: Decide on Design and Layout

If a re-design is a fundamental or contributing reason to the migration, then decide on any new design, visual or user-experience aspects before the migration starts. Don’t leave it until the last moment, have your designs approved before for an easier transition. Build these changes into your staging site.

Key tip: With any design or layout changes, mobile is vital. Search engines, and google in particular, are focusing even more on mobile users and experience as part of their assessments of sites. This is because the majority of users will be on mobile. Make sure that your site is designed for and runs smoothly on mobile devices.

 

Step 6: Map Your Redirections

Before starting any aspects of the migration, it is essential to create a full “redirection map”. This is a document that lists out all the redirections that will be created when redirecting your site.

In cases where existing domain names and URL structures are being retained, this list may be small and would only contain the redirections for any pages or content pieces that are being removed as part of the migration. However, if you are changing core URL directories or your domain name, this will be an extensive list. You can consider adding a level of automation to make creating it easier, but don’t cut corners and exclude certain pages or sections of the site if they do need redirecting.

Use the audit of your old site to identify all possible URLs and ensure each one that won’t be appearing in the same format post-migration will be redirected.

 

Stage 3: Core Migration Steps

Step 7: Make Technical Amendments

Depending on the technical amendments you want to make, now is the time to action them. Here’s a list of the changes you may need to make or test:

• If you’re changing hosting environments, platforms or your CMS, ensure your new environment is fully compatible with your site and has the functionality you expect. Conduct speed tests to test the performance of your site.
• If you’re rebranding, changing site layout or amending or adding experience aspects, ensure they are functional on all pages and operate consistently. Stress-test them – if you can find a way to break them, users will too.
• Test site extensions and core features, even if they’re not changed. Consider the following: Do all links work as intended and go to their correct destinations? Do extensions and JavaScript features work as intended?

 

Step 8: Configure For Live

Start to configure your site to go live, covering the following bases:

Migrate Website Files and Databases

• Transfer files via FTP/SFTP.
• Import databases and verify their integrity.

Update DNS Settings

• Schedule the DNS change to minimize downtime during the migration.
• Monitor propagation and troubleshoot issues.

Configure Security Aspects

• Set up security certificates (SSL/TLS) on the new site, this is a core step if transferring from HTTP to HTTPS.

 

Step 9: Test, Analyse and Crawl Your Staging Domain

Once your new site has been fully built and tested within the staging environment, it’s time to bring in the analytics and audit tools.

While keeping the staging site unindexable, provide temporary access to Google’s crawler. Remove the authorisation lock on your site for a time and request for Googlebot to crawl it. This is a core step as it will ensure that:

1. Google can read and eventually index your site correctly when it comes time to go live.
2. You can start to identify and eliminate page and crawl-related errors on staging such as 404s, incorrect canonicals.

Fix any discovered issues and then block access again until you’re ready to go to live.

 

Stage 4: Launch and Supervision

Step 10: Go Live!

Finalise your launch date and make all necessary preparations for your changeover. Choose a time and date that minimises disruption to users – ideally on a weekday and past midnight in the time zone the majority of your users live in. Let everyone associated with your website or organisation when the migration will be happening as they may experience knock-on effects from the migration.

Then, when the time comes, migrate!

 

Step 11: Monitor SEO Closely

Keep a very close eye on the performance of the site over the first 24 to 48 hours to discover and address issues as fast as possible.

• Use real-time monitoring tools to track site performance, uptime, and any error logs in real-time. Tools like Pingdom and UptimeRobot can provide immediate alerts if something goes wrong.
• Be prepared to act swiftly to resolve any issues that arise. Have a dedicated team ready to handle problems, whether they relate to server performance, broken links, or user experience.
• Monitor user feedback through support channels, social media, or direct communications to identify and fix any problems users encounter.

After this initial time period, it’s crucial to continue monitoring. Issues may arise after the initial uptime period as more periods of the site experience use. Monitor uptime and conduct regular speed tests to root out issues as they arise.

At the same time, keep an eye on your SEO performance. It is inevitable that drops will happen, but you can take steps to mitigate this and recover your rankings as soon as possible.

Post-Migration Timeline

1. Conduct Post-Migration Audits: Immediately after your migration, conduct an SEO audit to identify and quickly resolve any issues.
2. Track Rankings Closely: While you will see drops, pay attention to where these are happening and how large they are. Note any that seem out of the ordinary.
3. Be Patient at First: It will take time for your positions to start recovering, so if things don’t bounce back immediately there’s no need to panic.
4. Add New Content to Test: Adding new pages or content (as long as they are useful and relevant – don’t add things for the sake of it!), and tracking their performance, can be a good indicator of how search engines currently assess your site.
5. Perform Later Audits: Stay on top of any arising technical or crawlability issues with successive crawls.
6. Note Improvements or Consider Action: If rankings start to recover, then you can count the migration as successful. However, if there’s no sign of improvement after at least two months, that may be an indicator that your migration has not been successful. There are a number of options open to you, including reverting back to the backup of the original pre-migration site

 

Ensuring a Successful Migration

You can ensure a successful migration by following the steps of this checklist – and being meticulous in your planning, analysis, and error checking. The more you’re prepared, and the more attention to detail you pay, the fewer issues you’ll encounter.

Migrations take a lot of work, and it’s better to admit when you don’t have the capacity to fully handle it. When this is the case, it’s beneficial to involve the help of an SEO Agency like POLARIS. Explore our migration guide to get a better idea of how we breakdown and mitigate risk during site migrations.