A step-by-step guide to migrate your website content, SEO metadata, and analytics configuration correctly during a redesign or platform switch, preserving rankings and performance post-launch.
Most traffic losses after a redesign come from three mistakes: lost redirects, lost metadata and a blocked robots file. Work through this list before launch, then work through the last section again on launch day.
Before you change anything
- Crawl the current site and save the full URL inventory.
- Export every URL from Google Search Console with clicks in the last 12 months.
- Export the current titles, meta descriptions, H1s and canonical tags.
- Record the current rankings for your top 50 terms.
- Record the current organic traffic, by landing page, for the last 12 months.
- Save a copy of the current sitemap and robots.txt.
- Export the current backlink profile and note which pages earn the links.
Map the old site to the new one
- Map every old URL to exactly one new URL. No many-to-one guessing on money pages.
- Redirect with 301, never 302, for permanent moves.
- Redirect to the equivalent page, not to the homepage. Homepage redirects read as soft 404s.
- Keep redirect chains to one hop.
- Decide what happens to pages you retire: redirect, or return 410.
- Preserve the URL of any page that earns backlinks, unless you have a strong reason.
Carry the content across
- Move the full body copy, not a summary. Thin pages lose rankings.
- Carry titles and meta descriptions across, or improve them deliberately.
- Keep one H1 per page and preserve the heading hierarchy.
- Carry image alt text across. Do not ship empty alt on content images.
- Update internal links to point at the new URLs directly, not through redirects.
- Carry structured data across, and revalidate it on the new templates.
- Preserve publication dates and author attribution on articles.
Technical setup on the new site
- Emit a self-referencing canonical tag on every page.
- Pick one trailing-slash policy and apply it to links, canonicals and the sitemap.
- Serve one hostname. Redirect the others, www and non-www, in one hop.
- Generate a new XML sitemap containing only live, indexable URLs.
- Reference the sitemap from robots.txt.
- Confirm hreflang tags are correct if the site serves several languages.
- Confirm pagination and faceted URLs are not creating duplicate content.
Launch day
- Remove the staging noindex tag. This is the single most common launch failure.
- Confirm robots.txt does not disallow the whole site.
- Crawl the live site and fix every 404 and every redirect chain.
- Submit the new sitemap in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
- Confirm analytics and consent tools fire on the new templates.
- Confirm the SSL certificate covers every hostname you serve.
The first month after launch
- Check Search Console coverage reports weekly for new errors.
- Compare landing page traffic against the pre-launch baseline you saved.
- Watch Core Web Vitals in field data, not only in the lab.
- Re-crawl monthly to catch links that rot as editors add content.
- Expect a short ranking dip. Investigate if it lasts beyond four to six weeks.