Website Migration SEO Checklist: How to Move Your Site Without Losing Rankings

Most rankings lost during a website migration don’t disappear on launch day. They’re lost three weeks earlier, when someone signed off on a new URL structure without checking which pages were already earning traffic.

An SEO migration is the work of moving a site (to a new domain, platform, template or protocol) while carrying your search equity across with it. Get the sequence right and traffic dips for a fortnight, then recovers. Get it wrong, and you’re stuck rebuilding authority you spent years earning.

This is the full checklist we run for Australian businesses, from planning through to the 90-day recovery window.

Quick answer.

• An SEO migration protects search equity during a site move. Every URL change, template change, or domain change puts existing rankings at risk unless signals are deliberately mapped across
• Redirect mapping is the single highest-impact task. One-to-one, server-side 301s beat bulk redirects to the homepage every time, and Google recommends keeping them live for at least a year
• Benchmark before you touch anything. If you don’t have a pre-launch crawl, a rankings snapshot, and an analytics export, you can’t prove what broke or when
• Expect a short dip. Google states that for medium-sized sites it can take a few weeks or more for new URLs to appear in results
• The Change of Address tool only runs for 180 days. It also can’t be used for HTTP-to-HTTPS moves or www changes, which catches a lot of teams out

What is an SEO migration?

An SEO migration is any planned change to your website that alters how search engines find, crawl, understand or rank your pages, and the technical work that protects performance through that change.

The label covers more ground than most people expect. These are the six migration types we see most often:

A hosting move is the gentlest of these. Google’s own guidance for a site move without URL changes says a temporary drop in Googlebot’s crawl rate right after launch, followed by a steady climb over the following days, is normal behaviour.

Everything else on that list changes URLs, templates or both, and that’s where site migration SEO earns its keep.

Why site migration SEO goes wrong.

Migrations rarely fail for one dramatic reason. They fail from a stack of small omissions that compound.

The pattern is almost always the same. A development team owns the build, a design team owns the look, and nobody owns the 4,000 URLs currently sending organic traffic.

Here’s what typically slips through:

• Redirects built at category level instead of page level, so hundreds of deep pages land on a generic hub
• Staging noindex tags or a Disallow: / robots.txt pushed live with the new site
• Title tags and meta descriptions regenerated by the new CMS, wiping years of optimisation
• Internal links still pointing to old URLs, forcing every crawl through a redirect
• Structured data dropped because the new templates never had it built in
• Canonical tags pointing back to the old domain

None of these are exotic problems. They’re just invisible unless someone is specifically looking for them, which is why a documented SEO migration checklist beats good intentions.

Phase 1: pre-launch website migration checklist.

This phase should start four to six weeks before launch for a mid-sized site. Rushing it is the most expensive decision in the whole project.

Benchmark current performance. You need a defensible “before” picture. Without it, every post-launch conversation becomes guesswork. Capture and store the following:

• Full crawl of the live site. Screaming Frog, Sitebulb or similar – URLs, status codes, titles, meta descriptions, H1s, canonicals, word counts
• Google Search Console export. 16 months of query, page, country and device data
• Analytics export. Organic sessions, conversions and revenue by landing page, at least 12 months
• Rank tracking snapshot. Your priority keyword set, recorded the week before launch
• Backlink export. Which external domains link to which specific URLs
• Core Web Vitals baseline. Google’s “good” thresholds are LCP at or under 2.5 seconds, INP at or under 200 milliseconds, and CLS at or under 0.1, measured at the 75th percentile

Running our free SEO audit tool over the current site at this stage is a fast way to surface issues you don’t want to carry into the new build.

Build a one-to-one redirect map. This is the core deliverable of any SEO migration checklist. Every indexed URL on the old site needs a mapped destination on the new one. Pull your URL list from three places: your XML sitemap, your server logs, and Search Console. Sitemaps miss orphaned pages that still hold links.

Rules that matter:

• Map to the closest matching page, not the homepage. Bulk homepage redirects are treated as soft 404s and lose the value you were trying to keep
• Use server-side permanent redirects (301 or 308). Google ranks server-side redirects as the most reliable method, ahead of meta refresh and well ahead of JavaScript redirects, which can fail during rendering
• Avoid redirect chains. Google advises against chains longer than five hops, and notes Googlebot can follow up to 10. Point old URL straight to final URL
• Keep redirects for at least a year. That’s Google’s stated recommendation, and there’s no upside to removing them early
• Cover everything. Include redirects for paginated URLs, parameter URLs, PDFs and images, not just HTML pages

Recreate on-page and technical parity. The new site should match or beat the old one on every signal that matters before you switch anything on. Work through the critical technical SEO ranking factors template by template: title tags, meta descriptions, heading hierarchy, image alt text, schema markup, canonical tags, hreflang if you serve multiple regions, and internal linking depth. Pay attention to internal links specifically. Update them to point at final destination URLs in the new content, rather than relying on redirects to clean up after you.

Lock down and test staging. Staging environments need to be blocked from indexing and then unblocked at launch. Use HTTP authentication rather than robots.txt alone, because a Disallow rule that ships to production is one of the fastest ways to lose an entire site. Before sign-off, run a crawl of the staging site and compare it line by line with your live site crawl. Test the redirect map in bulk by running your old URL list through a crawler pointed at staging.

Pick your launch window. Time the move for a low-traffic period. For Australian businesses, that means working around your own calendar. Avoid the fortnight before EOFY if you sell to businesses, and stay well clear of the Black Friday to Boxing Day run if you’re in retail. Launch early in the week, early in the day. You want your full team available for the next 48 hours.

Phase 2: launch day SEO migration checklist.

Launch day is execution, not decision-making. Every item on your SEO migration plan should already be documented and assigned to a named person.

1. Lower DNS TTL a week beforehand so propagation moves quickly. Google suggests this for hosting moves specifically.
2. Remove staging blocks. Delete noindex tags, strip Disallow: / from robots.txt, and remove HTTP authentication.
3. Deploy the redirect map and spot-check your top 50 URLs by traffic manually.
4. Verify robots.txt on the live domain allows crawling of everything you want indexed – and that it still permits the AI crawlers you want reading your content, since those referrals now matter alongside classic organic.
5. Publish and submit an updated XML sitemap. Our guide to creating XML sitemaps that boost SEO covers structure for larger sites. Keep the old sitemap accessible temporarily so Google recrawls old URLs and discovers the redirects faster.
6. Verify the new property in Search Console, including all protocol and subdomain variants.
7. Submit Change of Address if you’re moving domains – and only then. It doesn’t apply to HTTP-to-HTTPS moves, www to non-www, or moves within the same domain. The signal it forwards lasts 180 days.
8. Confirm analytics and tag manager are firing on the new templates, and add a launch annotation.
9. Test conversion paths end-to-end: forms, checkout, phone tracking, booking flows.
10. Re-run a full crawl of the live site within the first hour.

Phase 3: the first 72 hours.

The first three days decide whether a small dip becomes a long one.

Check these daily:

• Server logs. Is Googlebot hitting the new URLs and getting 200s?
• 404 reports in Search Console and your log files. Every unexpected 404 needs a redirect added same-day
• Redirect chains and loops. Re-crawl and fix anything with more than one hop
• Index coverage. New URLs being discovered, old URLs moving to “Page with redirect”
• Core Web Vitals. New templates often regress on LCP
• Rankings. Daily tracking on your priority set, so you can spot page-level problems fast

Some volatility is expected and normal. What isn’t normal is a specific page type dropping out entirely. That’s usually a template-level error, not an algorithmic one.

If pages aren’t getting indexed after a few days, work through the causes in our breakdown of how to fix Google indexing issues before assuming it’s a waiting game.

Phase 4: weeks 1–12 maintenance.

Recovery isn’t passive. Google notes that for medium-sized sites it can take a few weeks or more before new URLs start showing consistently, and larger sites take longer.

Weeks 1–2.

• Fix every 404 and add missing redirects
• Chase down internal links still pointing at old URLs
• Compare crawled titles and meta descriptions against your pre-launch export and restore anything the CMS rewrote
• Verify structured data is validating on all key templates

Weeks 3–6.

• Contact the highest-value external sites linking to old URLs and ask for updates. Redirects pass value, but direct links are cleaner
• Compare page-by-page organic traffic against your benchmark. Isolate underperformers by template
• Review Search Console query data for terms you’ve lost rather than pages – a term drop across many pages points to a content or intent issue, not a technical one
• Address Core Web Vitals regressions properly now that real user data has accumulated

Weeks 7–12.

• Re-run a full technical crawl and compare against both your old-site and launch-day crawls
• Confirm the old domain’s redirects are still functioning and DNS is renewed
• Diarise a redirect review at 12 months rather than switching them off
• Report against the original benchmark, not against launch week

Migration types that need extra care.

Domain changes, including .com.au to .au. Since .au direct names became available, plenty of Australian businesses have moved their primary domain or registered both. auDA confirms there’s no plan to phase out .com.au, and that businesses commonly hold matching names in both namespaces with redirects pointing to a primary domain. If you’re making .au your canonical domain, treat it as a full domain migration: one-to-one 301s, Change of Address, Search Console verification for both, and updated citations across Google Business Profile, directories and social profiles.

Replatforming. Platform moves change URL patterns by default. Shopify, for example, forces /products/ and /collections/ paths. Map these deliberately rather than accepting whatever the import tool generates. Watch for duplicate product URLs across collections. Canonical tags need to be configured before launch, not after.

Redesigns with content changes. If you’re changing design and content simultaneously, you lose the ability to diagnose. Where budget allows, migrate the structure first, then revise the content four to six weeks later, once rankings have settled.

International sites. Hreflang tags break easily during migrations because they reference absolute URLs. Every hreflang cluster needs to be rewritten to new URLs, and every page in a cluster must reference every other page, including itself.

Mistakes that cost rankings.

1. Redirecting everything to the homepage. It’s fast, and it destroys page-level equity.
2. Deleting low-traffic pages during the move. Check backlinks first – a page with no traffic can still hold your strongest links.
3. Changing URLs without a reason. If the current structure works, keep it. “Cleaner URLs” is rarely worth the risk on its own.
4. Skipping the pre-launch crawl. You cannot diagnose what you never measured.
5. Removing redirects after three months. Google’s guidance is a minimum of one year.
6. Judging success in week one. Compare against the benchmark at 60 and 90 days.
7. No rollback plan. Keep a full backup of the old site and a documented path back.

Move without the drop.

A website migration checklist doesn’t eliminate risk; it simply makes it visible early enough to manage. Benchmark first, map redirects one-to-one, test on staging, and measure against real numbers for a full 90 days.

Planning a migration and want a second set of eyes on the redirect map before you launch? First Page is a Digital Marketing Agency in Australia that has run site migrations for Australian brands across ecommerce, professional services and multi-location retail.

Talk to our technical SEO services team about a migration review, or explore how our Australian SEO agency approach protects revenue through a replatform.