# Website migration checklist

Category: [Relaunch & Migration](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/category/relaunch-migration/) › [Planning & mapping](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/category/relaunch-migration/planning-mapping/)

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:

```
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.

## Related terms

- [Website relaunch](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/website-relaunch/index.md)
- [Website migration](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/website-migration/index.md)
- [Domain migration](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/domain-migration/index.md)
- [URL mapping](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/url-mapping/index.md)
- [Redirect mapping](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/redirect-mapping/index.md)
- [Staging environment](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/staging-environment/index.md)
- [Go-live](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/go-live/index.md)

## More on the searchVIU blog

- [The complete website migration SEO checklist for 2023](https://www.searchviu.com/en/website-migration-seo-checklist/)

## Sources

- [Site moves and migrations – Google Search Central](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/site-move-with-url-changes)
- [Redirects and Google Search – Google Search Central](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/301-redirects)
- [Website migration checklist – Ten Speed (secondary, topic source)](https://www.tenspeed.io/blog/strategic-website-migration-checklist)

---

Last updated: October 8, 2026
URL: https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/website-migration-checklist/