A new website should grow your traffic, not lose it. Yet many redesigns and platform migrations cause drops of 20–50% because SEO was treated as an afterthought. Plan it from day one with this checklist.
Before the migration
- Crawl the current site and export every URL, title, meta description, H1 and canonical.
- Benchmark performance: save Search Console clicks, top landing pages, rankings and conversions.
- Identify valuable pages — those with traffic, backlinks or conversions — and make sure they have a home on the new site.
- Create a redirect map from every old URL to its most relevant new URL.
On the staging site
- Block staging from search engines (password or noindex).
- Check titles, meta descriptions, headings and internal links on key templates.
- Validate structured data and XML sitemaps.
- Test Core Web Vitals and mobile usability.
Launch day
- Remove staging blocks and noindex tags.
- Deploy 301 redirects and test a sample of old URLs.
- Submit the new sitemap in Search Console.
- Update Google Business Profile, ads and important backlinks where possible.
After launch
- Monitor 404 errors and redirect any missed URLs.
- Track indexing, rankings and traffic daily for the first two weeks, then weekly.
- Compare against your benchmark and fix templates that underperform.
With a clear redirect map and careful monitoring, most migrations recover any small dip within weeks — and often finish ahead.