The Pre-Migration SEO Checklist: What to Check Before You Move Your Website

Moving your website to a new platform? This checklist covers what to record, check, and fix before the move, plus what to verify at launch and in the weeks after. It’s written for small business owners (law firms, clinics, restaurants, and local service businesses) moving off WordPress, but it applies to almost any migration.

Use it with your developer or agency, or as a way to confirm that whoever is handling your migration isn’t skipping steps.

Step 1: Record your baseline

Before anything changes, take a snapshot so you can measure the new site against the old one.

• Export a full crawl of the current site (every URL, status code, title, meta description, H1, canonical).
• Export top pages by organic traffic and conversions from GA4.
• Export queries and pages from Google Search Console (clicks, impressions, average position).
• Record rankings for your most important keywords, including local terms like “[service] near me” and “[service] in [city].”
• Note the number of indexed pages in Search Console’s page indexing report.
• Record Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS) for key templates: homepage, service page, location page, blog post.
• Export your backlinks to see which pages other sites link to most.

Step 2: Inventory URLs and plan redirects

• List every URL that should exist on the new site.
• Keep URLs identical wherever possible, including trailing slashes.
• For any URL that must change, map it one-to-one to its closest new equivalent.
• Never redirect everything to the homepage.
• Find existing redirect chains and update them so each old URL points directly to its final destination.
• Decide what to do with existing 404s: redirect the ones that have traffic or backlinks, let the rest go.
• Don’t forget images, PDFs, and other files that rank or get linked to.

Step 3: Preserve on-page SEO

• Copy title tags for every page (often stored in Yoast, Rank Math, or another SEO plugin, not in the page content).
• Copy meta descriptions.
• Keep one H1 per page and a logical H2/H3 structure.
• Keep the main body content that currently ranks. Edit to improve, not to cut what answers customer questions.
• Fix missing, duplicated, or overly long titles and descriptions found in the audit.
• Add descriptive alt text to images that are missing it.

Step 4: Check structured data (schema)

• Export the current schema from key pages.
• Validate it with Google’s Rich Results Test and the Schema.org validator.
• Confirm the business type is specific: for example Attorney or LegalService for law firms, MedicalClinic for clinics, Restaurant for restaurants, rather than a generic Organization.
• Confirm name, address, phone, and hours match your Google Business Profile.
• Remove duplicate or conflicting schema output from multiple plugins.
• Rebuild schema on the new site and validate again.

Step 5: Internal links and navigation

• Keep important pages in the main navigation or footer.
• Update in-content links to point to final URLs, not to URLs that redirect.
• Fix broken internal links found in the audit.
• Make sure no important page becomes an orphan (a page with no internal links pointing to it).

Step 6: Technical setup

• Create an XML sitemap that lists only indexable, canonical URLs.
• Review robots.txt so it doesn’t block important pages, CSS, or JavaScript.
• Set self-referencing canonical tags that use the live domain, HTTPS, and your preferred trailing-slash format.
• Choose one version of the domain (www or non-www, on HTTPS) and redirect all others to it.
• Keep the staging site blocked from indexing, and make sure that block is removed on the live site.
• Check the mobile layout on real devices.

Step 7: Content quality

• Identify thin pages (empty categories, tag archives, placeholder pages) and decide whether to improve, merge, or remove them.
• Find duplicate or near-duplicate pages and consolidate them, with 301 redirects to the stronger page.
• Mark pages that shouldn’t be indexed (thank-you pages, internal search results) as noindex.

Step 8: Tracking and conversions

• Document your Google Tag Manager container ID and the tags it fires.
• Confirm your GA4 property and the conversion events you rely on (form submissions, calls, bookings, orders).
• Document call tracking numbers and number-swapping scripts.
• List ad platform pixels (Google Ads, Meta, and others).
• Recreate everything on the new site and test each conversion in GTM preview mode and GA4 DebugView before launch.

Step 9: Pre-launch crawl comparison

This is the step most often skipped, and one of the most important.

• Crawl the new site on staging.
• Compare it with the original crawl: same URLs present, same (or improved) titles and descriptions.
• Confirm schema is present and valid on key templates.
• Confirm there are no new broken links or 404s.
• Test every redirect in your map: each should return a 301 and land in one hop.
• Compare page speed for key templates against your baseline.

Step 10: Launch day

• Remove any staging noindex or password protection from the live site.
• Submit the new XML sitemap in Google Search Console.
• Use URL Inspection to request indexing for your most important pages.
• Spot-check redirects and forms on the live domain.
• Confirm analytics and call tracking are recording real visits and conversions.

Step 11: The weeks after launch

• Check Search Console’s indexing and 404 reports regularly for the first several weeks.
• Fix unexpected 404s with redirects as they appear.
• Compare rankings, traffic, and conversions against your baseline.
• Expect some fluctuation while Google recrawls; investigate anything that doesn’t settle.
• Update your Google Business Profile and key directory listings if any URLs changed.

Who should actually do all this?

This is a lot to track, and most small business owners shouldn’t have to do it themselves. What matters is that someone does it, and can show you the before-and-after.

At GrowthFlow360, the AI-managed website and marketing platform by Hispanic Market Advisors, this process is built into every migration: audit first, keep URLs, carry over metadata and schema, 301 anything that moves, compare crawls before launch, then submit the sitemap and monitor rankings and 404s afterward.