If you own or manage a website, it’s inevitable that you will encounter a website migration at some point sooner or later. As an SEO for the past two decades, I find that site migrations are one of the most commonly over-looked aspects of search engine optimization. There are a number of reasons why a site migration might come about including upgrading old technology platforms, site functionality, re-branding, corporate acquisition or even because some decision-maker was told that the current framework was antiquated. Regardless of why, it’s important to know what a site migration entails and the risks associated. Here, I’ll discuss why it’s important to involve an SEO professional when undertaking a site migration from the beginning though the end, along with some common tasks to keep note of during this process.

What is a Website Migration?

A website migration is the process of moving a website from one environment to another, which can involve changes to its domain, hosting provider, technology framework, content management system (CMS), or overall structure. Any of these changes can be significant enough to potentially impact the site’s organic search visibility and performance in search engines.

Making The Case For Why An SEO Should The Lead Site Migration

In many organizations, site migrations are led by a senior marketing leader, product manager or someone with an engineering background. From experience (albeit biased), I would highly recommend considering having your SEO leader manage the site migration then partner with other stakeholders to ensure the greatest likelihood of success. My rationale is rooted in several reasons:

Organic Search traffic is usually #1 or #2 on most websites in terms of driving web traffic.
Site migrations can put your SEO traffic at risk unless managed effectively.
Generalist marketers are not well-versed in performance marketing & technical SEO while being more likely to prioritize branding and design at the expense of performance. Pretty websites are worthless if there is no traffic.
Product Managers generally have little experience with full site migrations. Especially at a larger organization, a product manager may have worked on just one webpage or a small aspect of the overall site experience. I interviewed a guy once for a web product manager role, with an impressive looking resume from a famous car brand but he turned out to be one of the most unqualified candidates I have ever interviewed and had an ego to boot. Site migrations require the expertise of someone who has managed the entire site experience.
Engineers are great at coding and putting together technical frameworks, but not necessarily well-versed in SEO nor performance marketing. React for example is arguably is the in-vogue framework of choice for engineers these days but your SEO traffic can become an unmitigated disaster if you’re migrating static content into a pure React app.
Good SEOs are data-driven and detail-oriented toward performance outcomes. I say this as someone who has led performance marketing teams for more than ten years. Experienced SEOs have also been multiple site migrations and know what is entailed. One key trait to look for however is whether your SEO is willing and capable of leading others.

Types of Site Migrations

Domain Migration: Changing the website’s domain name, such as moving from nike.com to nikeshoes.com. This often requires careful planning to maintain SEO rankings and redirect old URLs to new ones. Changing sub-domains is another common type of domain migration as sub-domains can be considered a separate domain by search engines. For example, if I changed this website from https://theseoconsultant.ai to https://www.theseoconsultant.ai, then that’s a sub-domain change and would result in entirely new URLs for every page on this site.
Protocol Migration: Transitioning from HTTP to HTTPS for improved security and better search engine rankings. This is a common migration that enhances user trust and site integrity. Most web browsers like Chrome won’t even allow you to access a non-secure HTTP URL these days for security reasons. Google officially made https protocol a SEO ranking factor in 2014 but believe it or not, there are still a lot of older sites out there these days that have not switched to https.
Hosting Migration: Moving a website from one hosting provider to another, which may involve changing from shared hosting to a dedicated server or cloud-based solution for better performance. This is especially common as a business starts to scale in size which may necessitate more bandwidth and/or adding security.
CMS Migration: Switching from one content management system to another, such as migrating from WordPress to Shopify. A CMS migration almost always includes redesigning the site and may necessitate URL changes as each platform handles URLs differently.
Structural Migration: Making significant changes to the website’s architecture, such as reorganizing content categories or updating navigation menus to improve user experience, or adding Javascript functionality to pages, can all have drastic impact on SEO performance if you’re not careful.
Content Migration: Transferring existing content (text, images, videos) from one location to a new one, which may also involve updating or refreshing that content. Migrating self-hosted images to a 3rd-party CDN is a common type of site migration.

Pre-Migration Phase

Define clear migration goals and objectives
- Site migrations are not to be taken lightly so it’s important to work with all stakeholders to define what are the objectives first of all. During this process you may have to have tough discussions and determine whether it’s worth the effort or not. People who make these decisions oftentimes are not marketers or SEOs so they might not be aware of the pros and cons of their decisions.
Assemble project team and establish communication channels
- Having the right team in place from IT, Marketing, Product, etc… and have clear communications channels is vital for having an effective SEO site migration. I have been a part of site migrations in the past where the key decision maker was not receptive to input and only involved me after the work was done. That puts you at a major disadvantage if SEO was not involved in the decision-making process.
Create a detailed project timeline
- Establishing clear project timelines and regular stand-ups is important for ensuring that the site migration stays on track. You can easily exceed your budget and timeline when there’s nothing to hold people and vendors accountable.
Perform a comprehensive SEO audit of the current website
Conduct a full website crawl to extract all URLs
- Common tools used for crawling sites are Screaming Frog, Site Bulb, SEMRush and Ahrefs. For larger sites you may need cloud-based enterprise crawling tools however such as DeepCrawl (Lumar) and Jet Octopus – probably my favorite SEO tool.
Identify and prioritize:
- Top-converting pages
  - You’ll need Google Analytics and/or Google Ads SEM data to determine what your top-converting pages are. These are the pages that result in the most leads or sales so pretty obvious you will want to identify these pages!
- High-traffic pages
  - Oftentimes your high-traffic pages will also be your top converting pages but in either case you will also want to prioritize these in your site migration. I personally try to keep URL changes to a minimum on pages like this unless I absolutely have to change them. Changing URLs generally doesn’t benefit SEO unless it has a lot of parameters and non-standard characters in there.
- Pages with high-value backlinks
  - Relevant 3rd party backlinks and citations are valuable for establishing your site as an authority in your vertical. A common issue with site migrations is these backlinks get lost in a URL migration and end up as a 404 error which not only will cause you to lose that link equity (or link juice as old-school SEOs like myself refer to it) but any referral traffic from those sites will also encounter an error which can have an opportunity cost. If lost, your new URL would likely not rank as well as the previous URL.
- Ranking keywords
- Landing pages for ads
  - If you’re spending money on paid search or paid social ads then you definitely will want to make sure that these are not lost or broken during a site migration. If you have landing pages that have thoroughly been tested then you might consider not changing these pages much or if at all if possible. There are some instances where it might be necessary however such as a re-branding project.
Create a complete list of redirects (1:1 mapping)
- Generally, you’ll need a redirect mapping strategy which for larger sites will have to handled programmatically. Smaller sites can have manual redirects but for large sites, you’ll need to figure out how to map URLs in a way that covers all of the necessary URLs while making things user-friendly ideally.
Benchmark current site performance:
- Traffic and user engagement metrics
  - User engagement should almost always be the top priority for any website. If you’re making any kind of site migration then these performance metrics are likely to change for better or worse so you’ll want to have a good baseline to compare against.
- Keyword rankings
  - When I was at The Search Agency and Auction Technology Group, my keyword ranking tool of choice was STAT Search Analytics. STAT is designed to monitor high volumes of keywords for a more reasonable price compared to tools like SEMRush. SEMRush keyword tracking is perfectly suitable for medium to smaller-sized sites however.
- Backlink profile
  - Ahrefs has the best backlink profile monitoring tools in my opinion. SEMRush does an ok job at it however.
Back up the original site
- Unexpected problems happen. You should always backup the original site in-case you have to rollback changes or need to reference something in the future.

Site Migration Phase

Set up hosting, DNS, CDN, and mail systems
Create the new site in a development environment
Implement and test redirects
- You can either bulk check redirects with a tool or take a sampling of URLs that use all of the possible redirect rules. You want to ensure that all URLs are 301 redirects if these are intended to be permanent. 302 should be used for temporary redirects.
Review and optimize SEO structure:
- URL structures
- Internal linking
- Site navigation menus
- Canonical URL tags
- Robots.txt file
- XML sitemaps
- Hreflang tags
- Structured data
- Mobile friendly UX
- Pagination
- Category filters
- Javascript rendering
Move analytics tracking codes
- Older sites can have a lot of deprecated tracking pixels embedded into the HTML which can slow down page load times. Now is the time to clean this up and ensure that you’re moving over the current tracking pixels and event tracking. Also ensure that all pages are tagged. If you have a patchwork type of analytics tracking then that will just lead to session-breaks which will ruin your analytics data making pre-and-post migration performance analysis difficult to impossible.
Perform a technical audit on the staging site

Post-Migration Phase

Crawl the new site and compare with pre-migration crawl
- No site migration is going to be 100% perfect so it’s important to crawl the site immediately after migration.
Verify all redirects are working correctly
Check for broken links and 404 errors
- Not every 404 error is worth spending time on redirecting but if you’ve done a good pre-migration audit you should have a priority list for what is most important. For URLs that do return a 404 error you’ll want to ensure that error page has a good experience that can guide the user toward a relevant page.
Submit updated XML sitemaps to search engines
Update Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools:
- Add new property
- Verify ownership
- Submit sitemaps
- Use Change of Address tool (if applicable)
Monitor site performance:
- Organic traffic
- Keyword rankings
- Crawl errors
  - A cloud-based crawler like Jet Octopus can allow you to easily compare crawls from pre and post migration.
- Indexation status
Address any issues or errors promptly
Continue monitoring and optimizing for several weeks post-migration

Every site migration is unique so I’ve just detailed the most common scenarios and workflows needed. If you anticipate having a site migration in the near-future, let’s talk then we’ll figure out a specific plan for you and I can work with your team to ensure a successful website migration.

SEO Site Migration Checklist