Website Migration Checklist: Avoid Traffic Loss

Website Migrations Are High Risk

A botched migration can lose 30-50% of organic traffic overnight. Careful planning prevents this.

Pre-Migration

Crawl and Benchmark

Crawl entire current site and save results

Record current rankings for target keywords

Document current organic traffic by page

Save current sitemap and robots.txt

Note all redirects currently in place

URL Mapping

Map every old URL to its new equivalent

301 redirect old URLs to new ones

Test redirects in staging environment

No URL should return 404 that previously returned 200

Content Audit

Verify all content transfers correctly

Check that metadata transfers (titles, descriptions)

Confirm structured data is in place

Test internal links point to new URLs

During Migration

Deploy during low-traffic hours

Monitor 404 errors in real-time

Test critical user journeys immediately

Verify redirects are working

Check analytics tracking is firing

Post-Migration

Week 1

Monitor traffic daily, compare to pre-migration

Check Google Search Console for errors

Submit updated sitemap

Monitor redirect chains (no double redirects)

Month 1

Track ranking changes for key terms

Fix any crawl errors reported by Google

Update backlinks where possible

Compare conversion rates to baseline

Common Mistakes

Forgetting to redirect old URLs

Missing canonical tag updates

Not updating internal links

Removing pages without redirects

Not monitoring post-launch