Website Migration Without Losing SEO Traffic: Checklist
Advanced3 minInnovialabs editorial team
In short
Traffic survives when every old URL leads with a single 301 redirect to its exact equivalent, metadata and content move over intact, and you monitor indexing and errors daily after launch.
The core rule of migration
Search engines already know your old URLs and their value. The goal of a migration is to pass that value to the new URLs without gaps. That takes three things: a complete URL map, correct 301 redirects and monitoring after launch.
The less you change at once, the easier it is to find the cause of a drop. If possible, do not combine a domain change, a CMS change and a structure change in one release.
Migration types and their risks
| Type | What changes | Main risk |
|---|---|---|
| HTTP → HTTPS | Protocol | Mixed content, forgotten redirects |
| Domain change | The whole address | Lost link equity without redirects |
| CMS change | Templates, URLs, markup | Missing meta tags, new page addresses |
| Structure change | Paths and nesting | Thousands of 404s, broken internal links |
Pre-launch checklist
- Collect all old URLs: a crawler, the sitemap, pages with traffic from analytics, pages with backlinks from webmaster tools.
- Build a URL map: old address → new address, one to one. Do not send everything to the homepage.
- Move the metadata: title, description, H1, canonical, hreflang, structured data.
- Keep the content: text, images with alt attributes, internal links.
- Protect the staging site with a password, not only robots.txt.
- Record a baseline: traffic, rankings for key queries, number of indexed pages.
Redirects done right
- Use 301 for a permanent move.
- No chains: the old URL goes straight to the final one.
- For removed pages with no equivalent, use a relevant section or an honest 404/410, not the homepage.
- Test redirects with a script against the whole map before launch.
An nginx example for a domain change:
server {
listen 443 ssl;
server_name old-domain.uz www.old-domain.uz;
return 301 https://new-domain.uz$request_uri;
}
Launch day checklist
- Turn on redirects and remove the indexing block from the new site.
- Check robots.txt, a sitemap.xml with new URLs, canonical tags pointing to new addresses.
- Add the new site to Google Search Console and Yandex Webmaster.
- For a domain change, use the Change of Address tool in Search Console and the site move setting in Yandex Webmaster.
- Update internal links so they do not pass through redirects.
Post-launch monitoring
Check daily during the first weeks:
- 404 and 5xx errors in logs and webmaster reports;
- the number of indexed pages for the old and new site;
- traffic and rankings against the baseline;
- Core Web Vitals of the new version.
Keep old redirects for a long time; do not remove them after a month or two.
Rollback criteria
Agree in advance on when to roll back:
- widespread 5xx errors or key sections unavailable;
- important pages drop out of the index and the cause cannot be fixed quickly;
- critical failures in payments or forms.
A small, temporary ranking fluctuation after a migration is normal. Roll back for technical breakage, not for the first dip.