Migrations & Canada
SEO website migration checklist.
A migration, new platform, new domain, or new URL structure, is one of the highest-risk things you can do to a site's SEO, and one of the most avoidable disasters. Traffic craters when it's rushed and stays intact when it's planned. Here's the checklist that preserves what you've earned, in order.
In short
A safe migration is planned before anything moves: inventory every URL, map one-to-one 301 redirects, preserve the content and metadata that earn rankings, launch with a crawlable site and no leftover noindex, then monitor daily. The disasters are all preventable. They happen when SEO is an afterthought to the redesign.
Before: inventory and map
The foundation of a safe migration is knowing what you have before you change it. Crawl and record every current URL, its rankings, its traffic and its content, then build a one-to-one redirect map from every old URL to its new equivalent. Nothing should be left to sort out after launch. The map is the single most important artifact, and it's built before anything moves:
- A full crawl and inventory of current URLs.
- A record of current rankings, traffic and top pages.
- A one-to-one redirect map, old URL to new.
- Preserved titles, content and metadata that earn current rankings.
- A crawlable staging build, noindexed until launch.
During: launch carefully
At launch, the redirects go live and get tested: 301s, single hop, no chains or loops, nothing landing on a 404 or the home page. Confirm the new site is crawlable and that the staging noindex is removed (leaving it on is a classic disaster that de-indexes the whole site). Submit the new sitemap in Search Console. This is a coordinated switch, not a hope-for-the-best deploy.
After: monitor and fix fast
The window right after launch is when problems surface and when catching them matters most. Watch crawling, indexing and rankings daily for the first weeks; check Search Console for spikes in 404s or crawl errors; confirm redirects are followed and pages reindexed. A problem caught in days is recoverable; the same problem found in a quarterly report is lost traffic you may not fully recover.
The mistakes that tank traffic
Almost every migration disaster is one of a short list: no redirects (or redirects to the home page), a staging noindex left live, content 'cleaned up' and deleted, a new stack that blocks crawlers, or nobody monitoring after launch. Every one is preventable with the checklist. The migrations that fail are the ones where SEO was an afterthought to the design.
Related questions
Quick answers.
When should SEO be involved in a migration?
At the planning stage, before URLs and content are finalised, not after launch. The cheapest migration is the one designed correctly; the expensive one is the recovery. If a rebuild is on your roadmap, the redirect map should exist before the design is signed off.
Will I lose rankings during a migration?
A well-executed one usually sees a brief, small fluctuation that recovers within weeks. A botched one can lose the lot. The difference is entirely in the preparation, redirects, preserved content, monitoring, not luck.
My traffic dropped after a migration. Can I recover it?
Often yes, especially if caught early. Diagnose what broke, missing redirects, blocked crawling, deleted content, and fix it. The sooner you look after the drop, the more comes back; a problem left for months is harder to fully recover.
Keep reading
Related guides.
Primary sources
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See also
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