Website migration SEO checklist: how to keep your rankings

Any change that alters the URLs, content or technical setup search engines have learned for your site. The common types are a domain change (moving to a new domain or merging two sites), a platform change (for example from Wix or a custom build to WordPress or Shopify), a protocol change from HTTP to HTTPS, a restructure of URLs and navigation, and a redesign that rewrites or removes content.

Each carries risk for a different reason. A domain move asks Google to transfer signals to a new address. A platform change usually changes every URL. A redesign often removes pages and text that were ranking, because they did not fit the new layout.

1. Benchmark everything. Export the top pages and queries from Search Console, the top landing pages from analytics and a full crawl of the current site. This is the record you will compare against.
2. List pages with backlinks. Use a backlink tool to find every URL other sites link to. These need redirects even if they get little traffic.
3. Build a redirect map. A spreadsheet with every old URL and its closest new equivalent. Redirect to the matching page, not to the home page, and avoid chains.
4. Keep what ranks. Compare the new page plan with the pages that earn traffic. If a ranking page has no home in the new site, give it one or redirect it to the most relevant replacement.
5. Carry over the on-page basics. Title tags, meta descriptions, headings, structured data and internal links for every important page.
6. Test on staging. Crawl the staging site, check every redirect returns a single 301 to a 200 page, and keep staging blocked from indexing until launch.

Switch on the redirects at the same moment the new site goes live. Remove any staging noindex tags or password protection, check that robots.txt does not block the site, and submit the new XML sitemap in Search Console. Do not block the old URLs in robots.txt: Google has to crawl them to see the redirects.

For a domain change, verify both the old and new domains in Search Console and use the Change of Address tool from the old property. Google's documentation says to keep redirects in place for at least a year, and in practice we leave them indefinitely, because old links and bookmarks keep arriving for years.

Google's site move documentation says a medium-sized site can take a few weeks for most pages to move in its index, with larger sites taking longer, and that temporary ranking fluctuations are normal. A well planned move usually settles within that window. Traffic that has not returned after two or three months is almost always a sign of a specific fault: missing redirects, removed content, a lingering noindex or a canonical pointing at the old site.

Monitor daily for the first two weeks and weekly after that. Watch the Page indexing report for new 404 errors, compare top pages and queries with your benchmark, and fix gaps as soon as they appear.

It is possible, but every extra change makes problems harder to diagnose, because you cannot tell which change caused a drop. Where the timetable allows, we prefer to separate a domain move from a redesign. When they have to happen together, the redirect map and the content comparison become even more important. If you are planning a rebuild, our guide to making a website SEO-ready covers what the new site needs, and as a web design company in Dubai we plan the migration as part of the build rather than after it. Moving a store between platforms? Our ecommerce web design in Dubai projects carry products, customers and redirects across in the same plan.