Website Migration SEO Checklist: How to Change Domain, Platform or URLs Without Losing Traffic

A website migration SEO checklist makes sure that when you change your domain, platform, URL structure or protocol, every old URL sends users and Google to the right new one, and nothing that ranked today disappears tomorrow. Google's own process has five parts: prepare the new site, build a complete old-to-new URL map, switch on server-side permanent (301 or 308) redirects, tell Google through Search Console, and monitor traffic and indexing until the move settles.

Most traffic losses after migrations come from avoidable mistakes: missing redirects, redirects to the homepage, leftover noindex tags, or changing too many things at once.

Key takeaways

• Change one thing at a time where possible (domain first, redesign later), as Google recommends.
• Build a URL map from sitemaps, analytics, server logs and backlink data, including images and PDFs.
• Use server-side permanent redirects (301 or 308) straight to the final URL; avoid chains.
• Don't redirect many old URLs to the homepage; Google may treat that as a soft 404.
• Use the Change of Address tool only for domain or subdomain moves, for every verified variant.
• Keep redirects at least a year, ideally indefinitely, and expect a few weeks of fluctuation.

Types of migration and their risk

Google advises splitting combined projects: for example, move to the new domain first, then change the layout. If you aren't changing URLs at all (hosting only), Google has a separate, simpler guide.

Phase 1: Plan (4–8 weeks before)

• [ ] Define scope: what's changing (domain, platform, URLs, design, content) and why.
• [ ] Benchmark: export Search Console performance (queries and pages), analytics traffic and conversions by landing page, Core Web Vitals and a crawl of the current site.
• [ ] Pick a low-traffic window. Google suggests timing the move with seasonal or weekly dips.
• [ ] Decide all-at-once or in sections. Google recommends moving small and medium sites all at once; large sites can move a section at a time, starting with a section that changes infrequently.
• [ ] Brief your host if the site is large. Google crawls more heavily after a migration, so the new server needs capacity.

Phase 2: Build the URL map

This is the most important deliverable. Google recommends finding old URLs from:

1. Sitemaps (likely your most important URLs)
2. Server logs and analytics (URLs with real traffic; cover a period that includes seasonal peaks)
3. Search Console's Links report (pages with internal and external links)
4. Your CMS (a full list of content URLs)
5. Embedded assets: images, videos, PDFs, JavaScript and CSS files that may get search traffic or links

Then, for each old URL, choose the closest equivalent new URL:

Store the map in a spreadsheet with columns: old URL, new URL, status code, traffic, backlinks, priority, tested (yes/no).

Phase 3: Prepare the new site

From Google's site move guidance:

• [ ] Import content and transfer images and downloads.
• [ ] Configure TLS certificates for HTTPS.
• [ ] Prepare the live robots.txt. If you block crawling during development, have the launch version ready.
• [ ] List every noindex used on staging so you can remove them at launch.
• [ ] Return 404 or 410 for content you're deliberately not moving.
• [ ] Self-referencing canonical tags on every new URL.
• [ ] Update hreflang annotations to new URLs for multilingual or multi-country sites.
• [ ] Update internal links to point directly at new URLs, not through redirects.
• [ ] Update structured data URLs (logos, breadcrumbs, product URLs); see the schema markup guide for small business.
• [ ] Prepare a new XML sitemap with the new URLs, plus keep a copy of the old sitemap.
• [ ] Verify old and new sites in Search Console, including all variants (www and non-www, HTTP and HTTPS), and carry over verification files or tags.
• [ ] Re-upload any disavow file to the new property if you used one.
• [ ] For a newly purchased domain, check for manual actions and leftover URL removals from the previous owner.
• [ ] Set up analytics on the new site, ideally tracking both old and new.
• [ ] Check Core Web Vitals on staging; a migration is a good time to fix performance. See Core Web Vitals explained and how to fix them.

Phase 4: Redirect rules

Google's recommendations:

• Server-side permanent redirects (301 or 308) wherever technically possible. Client-side redirects are a last resort.
• Redirect directly to the final destination. Googlebot can follow up to 10 hops, but Google advises keeping chains short, ideally no more than 3 and fewer than 5, because chains add latency and not all browsers handle long ones.
• Avoid irrelevant redirects. Sending many old URLs to one irrelevant page such as the homepage confuses users and may be treated as a soft 404.
• Don't worry about link credit. Google says permanent redirects don't cause a loss in PageRank.

Platform notes: Shopify

If you're migrating to Shopify, its redirect system has specific rules (as of October 2026):

• You can only redirect from broken URLs; if the old URL still loads a page, the redirect won't work.
• You can't redirect fixed Shopify paths such as /products, /collections and /collections/all, or URLs beginning with prefixes like /apps, /cart, /orders, /services or /shop.
• URLs with collection tag filtering and some query strings can't be redirected reliably.
• Limits: up to 100,000 redirects, or 20,000,000 on Shopify Plus.
• Redirects can be imported in bulk by CSV (Content > Menus > URL redirects).
• For international stores, test redirects in each market subfolder. Shopify's documentation describes redirects applying across subfolders but also advises creating individual redirects for specific locales where needed. See how to sell internationally on Shopify Markets.

On other platforms, redirects might live in server config (such as .htaccess on Apache), your CDN, framework config (for example Next.js redirects) or a CMS plugin. Choose one place to manage them.

Phase 5: Launch day

1. Turn on redirects (server config or CMS).
2. Remove staging blocks: robots.txt disallow rules and noindex tags.
3. Check canonicals point to new URLs.
4. Test redirects in bulk with a crawler or script against your URL map; spot-check key URLs with Search Console's URL Inspection tool.
5. Submit the new sitemap in Search Console. Google says you can then remove the old sitemap, though submitting both temporarily helps you watch indexing shift.
6. Submit Change of Address in Search Console if you changed domain or subdomain, for every verified variant of the old domain.
7. Update external references: social profiles, Google Business Profile website link, ad campaigns, email templates, and outreach to sites that send significant traffic through old links.

Phase 6: Monitor (weeks 1–12)

• [ ] Search Console Page indexing report: old URLs should decline as new URLs rise; watch for spikes in errors.
• [ ] Sitemaps report: new sitemap indexed count rising; Google notes warnings about redirects on the old sitemap are normal.
• [ ] Performance report: new URLs gaining impressions and clicks.
• [ ] Not found (404) errors: fix missing redirects quickly, prioritizing URLs with traffic or backlinks.
• [ ] Server logs: confirm Googlebot crawls new URLs without errors and the server copes with extra crawling.
• [ ] Analytics: traffic and conversions by landing page compared with your benchmark.
• [ ] Rankings for priority queries compared weekly with the benchmark.

Google says rankings can fluctuate while the site is recrawled, and that small to medium sites take a few weeks for most pages to move. Don't panic-revert in week one; investigate specific drops instead.

Common migration mistakes (and fixes)

From experience: In platform moves, for example from a legacy stack to Next.js on Vercel or from another platform to Shopify, the redirect map is where projects succeed or fail. The pages that hurt most when missed are rarely the obvious ones; they're old blog posts and PDFs with years of backlinks. Pulling server logs and the Search Console Links report before writing a single redirect catches most of them.

Website migration SEO checklist (summary)

• [ ] Scope defined; one major change at a time where possible
• [ ] Benchmarks exported (Search Console, analytics, crawl, Core Web Vitals)
• [ ] Complete URL map including images, PDFs and high-backlink pages
• [ ] New site: robots.txt, canonicals, hreflang, internal links, structured data and sitemap updated
• [ ] Old and new properties verified in Search Console (all variants)
• [ ] Server-side 301/308 redirects to final destinations; no chains; no mass homepage redirects
• [ ] Platform redirect limits and rules checked (for example Shopify)
• [ ] Staging noindex and robots.txt blocks removed at launch
• [ ] Redirects bulk-tested against the map
• [ ] New sitemap submitted; Change of Address submitted for domain moves
• [ ] External links, profiles and ads updated
• [ ] Monitoring routine for 12 weeks; redirects kept at least one year

Next steps

• Export your Search Console, analytics and backlink data now, before anything changes.
• Build the URL map and have a second person review the top 200 URLs by traffic and links.
• Schedule the launch for a low-traffic period and brief your host on crawl load.
• Plan weekly monitoring for at least 12 weeks after launch.
• For a technical review of a planned migration, see AI SEO consulting, or technical due diligence if the migration is part of an acquisition or platform rebuild.

Sources

• Google Search Central, How to move a site (with URL changes): https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/site-move-with-url-changes
• Google Search Central, Redirects and Google Search: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/301-redirects
• Shopify Help Center, Creating and managing URL redirects: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/online-store/menus-and-links/url-redirect
• Google Search Central, Build and submit a sitemap: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/sitemaps/build-sitemap

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