The SEO Migration Checklist: 47 Steps to Prevent Traffic Loss During a Site Move
Site migrations cause traffic drops when done poorly. Here's the comprehensive checklist that preserves rankings through any migration.
Site migrations (domain changes, platform changes, URL restructures, HTTPS transitions) are the most dangerous moments in a website's SEO life. Traffic drops of 30-50% are common when migrations are handled carelessly.
The 47-step checklist covers four phases: pre-migration (crawl baseline, redirect mapping, stakeholder alignment), implementation (redirect setup, canonical tags, internal link updates), launch day (monitoring, validation, rapid response), and post-migration (indexation tracking, traffic monitoring, issue remediation).
Find the traffic you're leaving on the table
Weekly: your biggest ranking opportunities, pages losing traffic, and the exact fixes to prioritize.
Each step includes the tools needed, the expected time investment, and the risk if skipped. We also cover the timeline (start planning 8 weeks before migration) and the team roles needed. The single most important step: complete redirect mapping with validation before changing anything.
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