A website migration can affect how visitors find pages, how search engines crawl your site, and how you measure results. Careful preparation reduces avoidable problems and gives your team a clear way to check the work. Start planning before the new site is ready to launch. Record your current URLs and performance, agree on what will change, and test the most important paths before switching over. This checklist covers the essentials.
Inventory URLs and content
Crawl the current site and export every indexable URL, along with its title, status code, canonical tag, and key analytics data. Include pages that may not appear in the main navigation, such as landing pages, blog posts, and product or service details. Save the export as a baseline. It helps you identify what needs to move and spot missing pages after launch.
For each existing URL, decide whether to keep it, replace it with a new URL, combine it with another page, or retire it. Map old and new addresses in a spreadsheet, and include the reason for any removal. Check that valuable content has a suitable destination; sending unrelated pages to the homepage can frustrate visitors and weaken the usefulness of a redirect.
Plan and test redirects
Create a redirect for every URL that changes, pointing directly from the old address to its closest relevant replacement. Use permanent redirects for lasting moves, and avoid chains where one redirect leads to another. Keep the mapping file clear enough for developers to implement, with separate columns for the old URL, new URL, and redirect status.
Test redirects on a staging site or in a controlled test environment before launch. Confirm that each old address reaches the intended page, returns the expected status, and does not create loops. Also check common URL variations, including trailing slashes, uppercase letters, and any changes to HTTP or HTTPS and www or non-www versions.
Protect analytics and tracking
Document the analytics tools, tracking IDs, tag manager setup, conversion events, and consent settings currently in use. Record key measurements before the migration, such as organic visits, leads, sales, and engagement for priority pages. This gives you a comparison point and helps distinguish a tracking problem from a real change in site activity.
Before launch, verify that the new site loads the correct tags and records important actions. Test forms, phone links, checkout steps, and other conversions using the tools’ preview or debug features. Make sure staging traffic is excluded from production reporting where appropriate, and check that consent choices still work as intended.
Check search visibility before launch
Review the new site’s page titles, headings, copy, internal links, and canonical tags for priority pages. Confirm that pages meant to appear in search are not blocked by robots directives or noindex tags. Check that the XML sitemap contains the correct live URLs and that internal links point to the new addresses rather than relying on redirects.
Prepare a launch-day test list with the most important URLs, redirects, templates, and conversion paths. After launch, crawl the live site and look for broken links, unexpected errors, missing metadata, and incorrect indexing controls. Submit the updated sitemap through your search engine tools, then monitor crawl reports, impressions, clicks, and conversions for changes that need investigation.
A migration checklist makes responsibilities clear and gives your team a reliable baseline for testing before and after launch. Keep the URL map, redirect rules, analytics notes, and test results together so they are easy to update. If you want guidance with planning or quality checks, Desert Shift SEO can help you prepare a measured migration.