Migrations are where rankings are most often lost. Almost every failure is preventable with a checklist.
Before you move
- Crawl the current site and export all URLs
- Map every old URL to its new URL (one-to-one)
- Note your top pages by traffic and links
- Copy titles, meta and structured data plans
- Have a rollback plan
During the move
- Set up 301 redirects for every changed URL
- Keep the same URL where possible
- Preserve titles, headings and content
- Update internal links to the new URLs
- Update canonical tags and sitemaps
- Keep robots.txt from blocking the new site
After the move
- Submit the new sitemap in Search Console
- Use the Change of Address tool for domain moves
- Monitor Coverage/Pages for errors and redirected URLs
- Check for redirect chains and 404s
- Compare traffic week over week for a month
Generate the redirects
Turn your old → new mapping into ready rules with the free redirect generator, and double-check broken links with the link extractor.