Practical Guide
June 2026
The migration checklist nobody gives you.
A website migration done badly can set a site back by months or years. This is what to check before, during and after — the list that rarely comes with the invoice.
Over a hundred migrations in. Platform to platform, server to server, domain to domain. Shopify to Visualsoft, Visualsoft to Shopify, Magento to WooCommerce, WordPress to Wix and back again. Drupal. Some truly funky custom builds I'd rather not think about.
The same things go wrong every time. Not because the people doing the work are incompetent — though sometimes — but because migrations are treated as technical lifts when they're actually preservation jobs. The goal isn't to get the new site live. The goal is to get the new site live without losing what the old site had earned.
Here's what that actually looks like in practice.
Before you touch anything
→
Full crawl of the current siteScreaming Frog or equivalent. Every URL, every title, every meta description, every H1, every canonical, every status code. This is your before state. Without it you have no way to verify what survived.
→
Export your redirect mapEvery URL that will change needs a redirect. Build the map before the migration not after. If you're coming off Visualsoft, the URL structure will be different — plan for it.
→
Document your plugin and configuration stateRank Math settings, caching configuration, consent plugin setup, image optimisation rules. Screenshot everything. Plugins reset to defaults on server migrations more often than you'd think.
→
Verify your image libraryCount them. Know where they live. Confirm the migration brief explicitly covers media transfer — not just pages.
→
Export GSC and GA4 baselinesClicks, impressions, top pages, top queries. You need a benchmark to measure recovery against.
During the migration
→
Do not go live on a FridayIf something breaks you want working days ahead of you, not a weekend.
→
Keep the old site accessibleIdeally on a staging URL. You need to be able to compare the two states side by side.
→
Verify the redirect file before switching DNSTest a sample of the most important redirects manually. If the .htaccess block isn't there, don't go live.
→
Check noindex status immediately after launchRank Math, Yoast, whatever you're running — confirm it hasn't reset to noindex on key taxonomies. This is the one that gets missed most often.
After — within the first 48 hours
→
Re-crawl immediatelyCompare against your pre-migration crawl. Any page that was 200 before and is now 404 is a problem. Any title tag that changed is a problem. Any canonical that disappeared is a problem.
→
Check all imagesSpot check across page types — homepage, category pages, product pages, blog posts. Missing images are often the last thing anyone looks at and the first thing a customer notices.
→
Verify plugin configurationsCaching, image optimisation, SEO plugin settings, consent management. Assume they've reset. Check them all.
→
Submit updated sitemap to GSCDon't wait for Google to find the new URLs. Tell it where they are.
→
Monitor GSC crawl errors daily for two weeks404s will surface. Some you'll expect. Some you won't. Fix them quickly — every crawl budget wasted on a 404 is a page that didn't get indexed.
A migration audit — pre and post — takes a day. Undoing the damage from not doing one can take considerably longer. If you're planning a migration or dealing with the aftermath of one that went wrong, the migrations page covers how this works in practice. Or get in touch directly.
Further reading: You moved the website but forgot the furniture — what a migration failure looks like from the inside.
Migrations
Technical SEO
Practical Guide
Redirects
Checklist
