Website Migration Checklist: How to Migrate Without Losing SEO

Most traffic drops after a redesign are not bad luck. They come from URLs that changed with nowhere to redirect, metadata that didn’t carry across, and pages that quietly disappeared. All of it is preventable.

Whether you’re moving from WordPress, Wix or Squarespace to Webflow, Framer, Astro or Next.js, this is the process we follow on every migration.

1. Crawl the old site before you touch anything

You can’t protect what you haven’t listed. Before design starts, export a full inventory:

• Every indexable URL: crawl with Screaming Frog or Sitebulb, then compare with your XML sitemap and Google Search Console’s indexed pages.
• Top pages by traffic and backlinks: pull 12 months from Search Console and your analytics tool. These are the pages you cannot afford to lose.
• Current metadata: title, meta description, H1, canonical and Open Graph tags for each URL.

Save it as a spreadsheet. It becomes your redirect map and your QA checklist.

2. Build the redirect map: one row per old URL

Every old URL needs a destination. The rules are simple:

• Same content, new URL → a 301 redirect to its new home.
• Merged content → 301 to the page that absorbed it, not to the homepage.
• Genuinely retired → 301 to the closest relevant page, or let it return 410 if nothing fits.

Redirecting everything to the homepage is the most common migration mistake. Google treats it like a soft 404 and the rankings go with it.

Avoid chains. If /a already redirects to /b, point it straight at the final URL.

3. Carry the on-page signals across

A new design shouldn’t mean new SEO. For your priority pages, keep:

• Titles and H1s, unless you are deliberately improving them.
• Body content depth: a sleeker page with half the words often ranks worse.
• Internal links: rebuild your navigation and in-content links so priority pages stay well connected.
• Structured data: Organization, Article, FAQ and Breadcrumb schema should exist on the new site from day one.

4. Stage it, then test it like a crawler

Before you switch DNS:

1. Block the staging site from indexing with noindex or password protection.
2. Crawl staging and fix broken links, missing titles and orphaned pages.
3. Test every redirect in your map. A script that checks status codes and final destinations takes minutes and catches dozens of errors.
4. Check Core Web Vitals on key templates. A migration is the perfect moment to get faster, not slower.

5. Launch day and the 30 days after

• Remove the staging noindex from production. This is the most expensive line of code to forget.
• Submit the new XML sitemap in Search Console.
• Watch the coverage and 404 reports daily for the first two weeks.
• Compare rankings and clicks for your top 50 pages week by week.

A small dip in the first one or two weeks is normal while Google recrawls. A sustained drop on specific pages almost always traces back to a missing redirect or a removed section of content, and your spreadsheet will tell you which.

The short version

Inventory everything, redirect one-to-one, keep what was working, test before launch and monitor after. Do that and a migration becomes a chance to rank better, on a faster, easier-to-edit platform.

Planning a move to Webflow, Framer, Astro or Next.js? We handle the full migration (redirects, schema and post-launch monitoring included), so your rankings come with you.