Guides
Website Migration SEO Playbook: Redirects, URL Mapping, and Post-Launch Checks
A step-by-step website migration playbook: what a migration risks, how to map URLs and redirects, the launch-day checklist, and how to monitor recovery.
Run a fresh DomainLens audit and use the report as your priority list.
What a migration actually risks
A migration is any change to the URLs, platform, domain, protocol, or templates that search engines already understand. The danger is not the new site — it is the discontinuity. Google has years of accumulated signals attached to your old URLs, and if those URLs change without a clean path from old to new, that equity is stranded.
Almost every post-migration traffic drop traces back to the same handful of causes: redirects that were missing, chained, or pointed at the wrong page; URLs that quietly disappeared; a staging noindex that shipped to production; or internal links still pointing at the old structure. This playbook is about preventing each one, in order.
Before launch: map and prepare
- Crawl the current site and export every indexable URL, plus your top pages by traffic, links, and conversions from analytics and Search Console.
- Benchmark the current state: rankings, indexed count, Core Web Vitals, and top landing pages, so you can measure recovery afterwards.
- Build the new URL structure and confirm the new templates keep titles, headings, canonicals, and structured data.
- Verify the staging site is blocked from indexing (noindex or auth) — and note that this must be removed at launch.
The URL mapping and redirect plan
The redirect map is the single most important deliverable. Every old URL needs a deliberate destination.
- Map every old URL to its closest new equivalent — one-to-one where possible, never a blanket redirect to the homepage.
- Use 301 (permanent) redirects so signals pass; avoid 302s for permanent moves.
- Eliminate chains: old URL should hop straight to the final new URL, not through two or three redirects.
- Redirect old URLs that have no new equivalent to the most relevant category or parent, or return 410 if the content is genuinely gone.
- Update internal links, canonicals, and the XML sitemap to the new URLs — do not rely on redirects to paper over old internal links.
Launch day checks
- Remove the staging noindex and confirm production pages are indexable — this is the most common catastrophic miss.
- Spot-check redirects across every template: each returns a single 301 to a live 200 URL.
- Confirm robots.txt on the new site allows crawling and does not carry over a staging "Disallow: /".
- Submit the new XML sitemap in Search Console and keep the old sitemap available briefly so Google finds the redirects.
- Verify canonicals, titles, and structured data render correctly on the live pages.
Mistakes that tank traffic after a migration
- Shipping the staging noindex or a "Disallow: /" to production, deindexing the whole site overnight.
- Redirecting everything to the homepage instead of mapping page-to-page, which discards ranking equity.
- Leaving redirect chains or loops that dilute signals and slow crawling.
- Changing the URLs and the design and the platform and the content all at once, so you cannot tell which change caused a drop.
Post-launch monitoring
Expect a short dip while Google reprocesses the redirects; the goal is recovery within weeks, not a permanent loss. Watch Search Console crawl stats, the Page Indexing report, and coverage of the new URLs, and re-crawl the site to catch any redirect that broke or any 404 you missed.
Use DomainLens on the new URLs to confirm each page returns 200, carries the right canonical, is indexable, and holds its Core Web Vitals — the same checks that reveal a stranded redirect or a lost noindex before the ranking drop shows up in analytics.