Migrations don’t kill SEO - skipped steps do. Most horror stories are URLs changed without redirects, meta lost in the move and tracking that silently stopped.
Before the move
- Full crawl of the current site - every URL, title, meta and schema captured.
- Benchmark rankings and organic revenue by page.
- Map every old URL to its new equivalent - by revenue priority, not alphabetically.
During the build
- 301 every changed URL to its closest equivalent - never a blanket redirect to the homepage.
- Carry over titles, meta descriptions, schema and image alt text.
- Keep collection structure aligned to search intent.
- Staging environment blocked from indexing.
After launch
- Verify redirects on the top 100 URLs on day one.
- Submit the new sitemap in Search Console.
- Watch coverage and 404 reports daily for two weeks.
- Re-run tracking QA - analytics, pixels and conversion events end to end.
The one rule
- Nothing that earned traffic disappears without a 301 to its closest equivalent.