Website migration SEO checklist

Google separates two cases. Its guide «How to move a site» calls a move with URL changes any switch from HTTP to HTTPS, change of domain name or change of URL paths. Changing only the hosting, with the URLs untouched, is covered in a separate guide as an infrastructure change.

An example: a consultancy moves from its old CMS to a new one and, along the way, turns /services/audit.html into /services/audit. The domain stays the same, yet every URL is new to Google, and without a redirect each old page ends in a 404 error.

1. Build the URL inventory. The list comes from the sitemap, the Search Console pages report, analytics and a crawl of the site. Include images and PDFs, which can also get visits from Google. If this fails, the forgotten URLs end in a 404.
2. Flag the URLs that earn links from other sites, which you find when you check who links to your site. They lose the most value if their redirect breaks.
3. Build the redirect map: one row per old URL and its new destination, the page closest in content. If this fails, each old page loses the rankings it had.
4. Copy the titles, meta descriptions, headings and structured data of each page. If they change at the same time as the URL, you will not know whether a drop comes from the migration or from the new copy.
5. Add the new site to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, with all its variants (www and non-www, HTTP and HTTPS), and keep the verification file or tag.
6. Pick the date. Google recommends moving during a period of low traffic and changing one thing at a time: first the domain, then the design, not both together.

Google advises against redirect chains. Googlebot can follow up to 10 hops, but the guide recommends redirecting to the final destination and, if that is not possible, keeping the chain ideally to no more than 3 redirects and fewer than 5.

Redirecting many old URLs to the home page is the most expensive mistake. Google explains that it confuses visitors and might be treated as a soft 404 error, that is, as a page that does not exist. The exception is content merged into a single new page: there, every old URL can point to that page.

Redirects are not removed after a few weeks. Google’s guide puts it this way: «Keep the redirects for as long as possible, generally at least 1 year.»

1. Turn on the 301 redirects and test a sample of old URLs with the URL Inspection tool in Search Console. Google says it frequently sees redirects pointing to URLs that do not exist on the new site.
2. Remove the noindex rules and robots.txt blocks that were only there while the site was in staging. If they stay, Google does not index the new site.
3. Check that each new page has a self-referencing canonical tag and that the hreflang tags of the other language versions use the new URLs.
4. Submit the new sitemap in Search Console and in Bing Webmaster Tools. Google notes that, from then on, the old sitemap can be removed.
5. If the domain changes, submit a Change of Address in Search Console from the old property. Google says it is only needed when moving to another domain or subdomain, not for HTTP to HTTPS moves or for moving paths within the same domain.

According to OpenAI, sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot, its search crawler, will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, and a robots.txt change can take about 24 hours to apply. The quickest check is to test whether AI crawlers can read your site on the day of the move.

To know whether assistants are visiting the new site again, you create a rule in the firewall or CDN that logs without blocking the requests of each provider’s bots, identified by their user agent and verified by IP when the provider publishes its ranges. Those logs show which pages each bot visits and when. This is what DoGeo sets up for each client after a migration.

Each bot tells you something different. OAI-SearchBot shows which pages can enter ChatGPT search, and ChatGPT-User is, according to OpenAI, the agent that visits a page when someone asks ChatGPT a question: the closest signal that the assistant read that page in a conversation. The log does not show what the assistant writes in its answer.

1. Check the page indexing report every week: indexed URLs on the old site should go down and those on the new site should go up. A spike in 404 errors points to a missing redirect.
2. Compare queries and clicks in the performance report with the weeks before the move, and track the rankings of the keywords that brought the most traffic.
3. Update internal links so they point straight to the new URLs instead of going through the redirect.
4. Ask the sites that send the most visits to update their link, and update social media profiles and ad campaigns.
5. Keep the redirects for at least a year, and do not consider the migration finished until Google has visited every old and new URL.

Kulturo, a tech recruitment agency and DoGeo client, made the switch on 24 August 2026: 396 clicks and 66,910 impressions from 24 August to 13 September, against 234 clicks and 56,307 impressions from 3 to 23 August. Those three weeks coincide with a record in Kulturo’s impressions in Google’s AI answers, so the figure shows that no traffic was lost, not that migrating made it rise. The rest is in Kulturo’s results with DoGeo.

A website specialising in rigid inflatable boats moved from Wix to code, also with 301 redirects, and the DoGeo team states that no traffic was lost in any of its migrations. What is specific to leaving Wix is covered in Wix alternatives and how to leave it.

Google warns that fluctuations are normal: with any significant change to a site, rankings may fluctuate while Google recrawls and reindexes it, and for medium-sized websites it can take a few weeks or more before Google starts showing the new URLs instead of the old ones.

If the URLs can stay identical, the migration is simpler: Google treats it as an infrastructure change and there is nothing to redirect. If they cannot, the redirect map is mandatory.

Choosing the destination CMS is a separate decision, compared in Webflow vs WordPress for SEO. The questions to ask before deciding are whether the new CMS allows server-side 301 redirects, control over robots.txt and exporting the content if you ever have to migrate again.