Website migration SEO checklist

A site migration is any project where a website's platform, URL structure, design or domain changes: moving from WordPress to Webflow, reorganizing URLs alongside a redesign, merging two sites. For search traffic the risk is the same: if you do not correctly carry over everything Google knows about the old addresses to the new ones, rankings and traffic can disappear. The checklist below covers the migration in four stages.

1. Before the migration: the inventory

A successful migration depends on knowing exactly what is on the old site. The inventory does not come from the sitemap alone; some pages are missing from the sitemap but still earn links or traffic.

[ ] You crawled the whole site with a crawler; every HTML URL, status code, title and canonical is listed.
[ ] The URLs in the sitemap are added.
[ ] Pages with impressions or clicks in Search Console over the last 12–16 months are added.
[ ] Landing pages with traffic in your analytics tool over the last 12 months are added.
[ ] Pages with external backlinks are added from a backlink tool.
[ ] Images, PDFs and other files are listed separately.
[ ] Traffic and link value are noted for each URL; prioritization will be based on these.

2. The redirect map

The redirect map is a table that states, row by row, which new URL each old URL goes to.

Old URL	New URL	Action	Note
/seo	/hizmetler/seo-ajansi	301	Moved into the services folder
/blog/geo-nedir	/blog/geo-nedir	Kept	URL unchanged
/projeler/ornek-proje	/vaka-calismalari/ornek-vaka	301	Content merged into a case study

[ ] Every old URL is on a single row: is it kept, 301-redirected or removed?
[ ] The target is the closest page by content; not everything is redirected to the homepage.
[ ] No chains: instead of A → B → C, A → C and B → C.
[ ] Removed content with no equivalent deliberately returns a 404 or 410.
[ ] Upper/lower case, trailing slash and www/non-www variants follow a single rule.
[ ] On a multilingual site, each language's URLs are mapped separately.

3. On the new site, before launch

[ ] Internal links point directly to the new URLs; no links point to redirects.
[ ] Each page's canonical tag points to its own new URL.
[ ] On a multilingual site, hreflang pairs are defined reciprocally with the new URLs.
[ ] Titles, meta descriptions and H1s on valuable pages are kept or deliberately improved.
[ ] Structured data is rebuilt on the new pages.
[ ] The new sitemap only contains canonical URLs that return 200.
[ ] robots.txt does not block crawling in production; the block from the staging environment is removed.
[ ] Analytics and tags are installed on the new site; conversions are tested.
[ ] Page speed and Core Web Vitals are checked on the new site.

4. Launch day and after

[ ] Every old URL in the redirect map is tested: each one 301s to the right target in a single hop.
[ ] The new sitemap is submitted to Search Console; a sitemap with the old URLs is kept for a short while.
[ ] If the domain changed, the Change of Address tool in Search Console is used.
[ ] Key pages are checked with the URL Inspection tool.
[ ] In the first weeks, 404s and indexing errors in Search Console are checked daily.
[ ] Organic traffic and rankings are compared with the pre-migration period, by page group.
[ ] Owners of the most valuable external links are asked to update their links to the new URLs.
[ ] Redirects are kept for at least a year, and permanently for pages with external links.

Notes specific to moving from WordPress to Webflow

Webflow publishes collection (CMS) pages under a folder; blog posts, for example, live at /blog/post-name. If your WordPress posts sit at the root or use different category structures, the URLs change and need redirects. Webflow lets you define redirects one by one or in bulk in the project settings. Plan ahead for the Webflow equivalent of features added through WordPress plugins (forms, multiple languages, structured data).

If you want to plan the technical side of the migration together, see our WordPress to Webflow migration service, or the technical SEO page for a platform-independent audit. If you are designing the new site from scratch, our web design agency page explains our process. The technical details of 301 redirects are in the 301 redirect glossary entry.

Frequently asked questions

Will we lose traffic when we migrate the site?

Google says that site moves with URL changes can cause temporary fluctuations in search results. Correctly mapped 301 redirects, updated internal links and canonical tags keep that fluctuation short; lasting losses usually come from missing redirects or removed content.

How long should 301 redirects stay in place?

Google recommends keeping redirects for as long as possible, generally at least a year. The safest approach is to keep redirects for pages with external backlinks permanently.

Do URLs have to change when moving from WordPress to Webflow?

No. Because Webflow publishes collection pages under a folder, some URLs may change, but with static pages and a suitable collection structure most existing URLs can be kept. Every URL that changes needs a 301 redirect.

What should I do in Search Console if the domain stays the same?

The Change of Address tool is only for domain changes. If the domain stays the same, submit the new sitemap, watch the Page indexing and Performance reports closely, and check key pages with the URL Inspection tool.

Should the old sitemap be removed?

Keeping a sitemap with the old URLs for a short while right after the move can help Google discover the redirects faster. Once the redirects have been processed, only a sitemap with the new URLs should remain.