A website migration checklist is an ordered list of checks for a site move, such as a domain change, a new platform or new URLs, so that rankings and indexing survive the change. Most lists split into three phases: before launch, launch day and after launch.
Checklist
The backbone comes from Google’s guidance for site moves with URL changes.
- Before launch: map every old URL to its new one, including images, videos, JavaScript and CSS files. Verify old and new site in Search Console and prepare the new robots.txt.
- Launch day: switch on server-side permanent redirects (301 or 308), point canonicals and hreflang to the new URLs, and submit a sitemap. For a domain change, file a Change of Address.
- After launch: test the redirects, watch both sites in Search Console, and keep the redirects for at least one year.
Google also advises changing only one thing at a time.
Example
A spot check on launch day tests whether an old URL reaches its final destination in one hop:
Code
GET /old-page → 301 → /new-page → 200
Google advises avoiding redirect chains. Googlebot follows up to 10 hops, but if a chain cannot be avoided, Google recommends ideally no more than 3 hops and fewer than 5. Redirecting many old URLs to the home page can be treated as a soft 404.
More on the searchVIU blog
Sources
- Site moves and migrations – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
- Redirects and Google Search – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
- Website migration checklist – Ten Speed (secondary, topic source)tenspeed.io
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