Website migration SEO checklist (2026): how to switch platforms and protect your Google traffic

A website migration SEO checklist makes sure Google can match every old page to its new one when you switch platforms, change domains or restructure URLs. List every URL that earns traffic, keep URLs the same wherever you can, 301-redirect each one that changes to its closest match, and launch only when the redirects test clean. Then compare Search Console with your baseline every week until traffic settles.

If you’re moving to Ploy, Ploy’s Agent can run most of this checklist for you.

What the data says about migration traffic

Most migrations lose some traffic for a while. How much, and for how long, depends on what changes.

The recovery studies estimate traffic or visibility with third-party SEO tools, and every author sells SEO or migration services. Google’s own estimate is shorter. At an October 2026 Search Central event, Gary Illyes put a typical site move at one to three months and the slowest at six months to more than a year, according to an attendee’s recap.

Three patterns hold across the data:

• Domain changes recover slowest. The longest timelines come from the domain-change samples.
• Broken redirects are the loss you control. A dead linked URL is a backlink pointing at nothing.
• The first month predicts the result. In the Laika data, sites whose visibility rose in the first four weeks succeeded 83% of the time. Sites with a negative first month succeeded 30% of the time.

Four migrations that went wrong

Leadpages moved about 1,500 pages to a new codebase in April 2026 and switched from www to the bare domain at the same time. The team’s write-up says the domain-level redirect shipped, but the page-level map did not. Nearly 400 page-level redirects went live three months later, and the team found two crawlable copies of the old site on internal subdomains. They blame the June core update for more than half of the drop, and the missing redirects for the part they controlled: “Ours arrived three months late, and that gap is where the damage lived.”

WooCommerce moved from WooCommerce.com to Woo.com in October 2023 and moved back on April 9, 2024. “Moving to Woo.com created challenges for our users to find WooCommerce in Google searches, which were made worse following Google’s March update.”

Nightify moved from nightify.it to nightify.me in November 2025. By April 2026, the team reported that Google traffic had fallen from about 8,000 monthly clicks to roughly 300, even with one-hop 301s in place. Search Console showed about 61,000 pages on the new domain as crawled but not indexed.

Daniel Mercer’s team changed the URL structure of 27,854 pages in one deploy, and “our Search Console impressions fell 81.7% in a week,” he wrote on DEV.

All four changed the domain or the URLs. Two also landed next to a Google core update, which made the cause harder to pin down.

Let Ploy run the migration for you

The Rebuild your site on Ploy Ploybook turns this checklist into a guided project. Ploy’s Agent lists your pages and content, agrees the plan with you, builds the approved pages and checks content and routes before you switch the domain. The Publish Readiness Ploybook checks crawlability, indexing, redirects, canonicals, robots.txt and sitemaps before you go live. The CMS Migration to PloyDB Ploybook moves blog posts and other CMS content and keeps existing URLs where possible.

Sengo, a Quebec City agency, moved its WordPress site of about 600 pages to Ploy in one night. Before changing anything, Ploy’s Agent read every sitemap and all of the metadata, and found about 50 mistakes already on the live site.

Ploy rebuilds each page as an editable first pass, not an identical copy, so you review every page before it goes live. Connecting your own domain needs a paid plan. Starter includes one custom domain family, and Pro includes five.

Pre-launch checklist

• List every URL that earns traffic. Export pages with clicks in the last 12 months from Search Console, crawl the site, and add every URL with backlinks.
• Include files. Images, PDFs and other files that other sites link to need redirects too. In the PageSpeed Matters data, 24 of 30 linked WordPress upload files on 17 sites returned a 404.
• Record a weekly baseline. Save clicks, impressions and average position by page for the three months before the move.
• Change one thing at a time. Google’s site move guide recommends it. Switch platforms on the same URLs first and redesign later.
• Carry over on-page SEO. Keep each page’s title, meta description, H1, copy, structured data and self-referencing canonical tag.
• Keep internal links. A slimmer navigation removes links Google used to find and rank your pages.
• Remove staging blocks. Make sure no “Disallow: /” rule or noindex tag reaches the live site.
• Lower your DNS TTL to a few hours at least a week before the move, as Google’s hosting change guide suggests.

Build your redirect map

A redirect map pairs every old URL with its new URL and status code. Download the redirect map template (CSV). It adds columns for clicks, referring domains, language and notes.

• Redirect one to one with a 301, to the closest equivalent page.
• Skip chains. Point every old URL straight at its final destination.
• Don’t send everything to the homepage. Google can treat that as a soft 404. A page with no replacement should return a 404 or 410.
• Use folder rules for whole sections. When /case-studies/ becomes /customers/, one prefix rule covers the folder.
• Keep redirects for at least a year, as Google recommends.

On Ploy, one routing rule can redirect a whole folder, and a site can have 20 rules in total. Keeping paths the same saves the most work.

Move one section at a time

Google recommends moving every URL at once for small and medium sites that change URLs. John Mueller has also warned against splitting a domain move. “Practically speaking, it’s not going to be seen as a full site move,” he said of a site that moved its homepage to a new domain first, as reported by Search Engine Journal.

A staged move works when the domain and URLs stay the same and only the platform changes. Google has nothing to reassign, so you can switch one section, watch it and fix problems before they reach the whole site:

1. Move one section, such as the blog, to the new platform on the same URLs.
2. Serve it through a reverse proxy, so the new platform answers for that section and the old host answers for everything else.
3. Watch indexing, impressions and 404s for that section for two to four weeks.
4. Move the next section.

Ploy’s routing rules do this on your existing domain. Ploy serves the paths you choose, and a fallback proxy sends every other path to your current host.

Launch-day checks

Switch DNS only when every check passes:

• Redirects test clean. Old URLs from every section return one 301 to the right page, starting with your top pages.
• One canonical host. The www or bare domain version redirects to the other.
• Robots.txt and noindex allow crawling on the live domain.
• The new sitemap is submitted in Search Console, and you’ve requested indexing for your top pages.
• Change of Address is filed in Search Console if the domain changed. It doesn’t cover www or path changes.
• Forms and analytics work on the live domain.
• The old host stays live for at least 72 hours in case you need to roll back.

On Ploy, SSL, the sitemap index, canonical tags and the www redirect are set up for you. Ploy flags pages missing your Google Analytics, Tag Manager or Meta Pixel tag after you publish, and you can restore an earlier version if a release breaks something.

The first 30 days

Check every day in week 1 for 404s on old URLs, redirect errors and whether your top pages are indexed. From week 2, compare clicks, impressions and position with your baseline page by page, plotted weekly. Leadpages called monthly averages the mistake that cost them most, because they hid the shape of the decline.

Set a date when waiting becomes auditing. If traffic is still more than 10% down after 8 to 12 weeks, audit redirects, internal links, indexing and templates. On Ploy, built-in analytics and a connected Search Console let you ask Ploy’s Agent how traffic, indexing and rankings compare with your baseline, and a scheduled Ploybook can send that report to Slack every week.

Platform-specific migration guides

Leaving a specific platform? Start with its step-by-step guide.