A checklist for migrating without losing traffic
Most migrations are lost in preparation, not on launch day. Here is the checklist we use.
Quick answer
The foundation of a loss-free migration is a complete pre-migration URL inventory and a one-to-one redirect map for every legacy URL. Funnelling redirects to the homepage is treated by search engines as a soft 404.
Before you migrate
Take a full crawl, export 16 months of query and page data from Search Console, and pull the 500 highest-revenue pages from analytics. Those three datasets are the basis of your redirect map.
The redirect map
Every legacy URL should 301 to its closest content equivalent. Where none exists, use the nearest category page — the homepage should never be the default target.
Launch day
Manually test the first 50 URLs immediately after launch, verify robots.txt did not ship in blocking mode, and resubmit the sitemap.
The first two weeks
Monitor crawl errors, indexation status and ranking movement on your top 100 queries daily. Most problems are catchable — and reversible — inside that window.
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