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The Website Migration Checklist

Every item here states what has to be true and the check that proves it, ordered by the phase where fixing it is still cheap. Tick items off as you go, your progress stays in this browser.

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Launch day

The cutover window itself, where problems are quick to introduce and still quick to reverse.

Launch day

The staging index block is confirmed removed by request How to verify. Fetch a live URL and read the headers and robots.txt yourself. Do not accept "it was removed" from memory.
Redirects are live and returning 301, not 302 How to verify. Request a sample across every mapped pattern and confirm a permanent status code and the right destination.
The exceptions are tested, not just the patterns How to verify. Request the manually mapped URLs specifically. Patterns usually work; the hand-mapped exceptions are where errors hide.
Analytics and tag firing are confirmed on the new templates How to verify. Complete a real transaction or lead submission and confirm it lands with the expected attribution, rather than assuming the tag copied over.
A rollback plan exists and someone has read it How to verify. Confirm who decides, what the trigger is, and how long a rollback takes, and that the people on call have read it before launch night.
The new sitemap is submitted How to verify. Submit the index sitemap in Search Console and confirm it is read without errors.

Post-launch

The recrawl window, where the real result of the migration becomes visible.

AI channel

AI crawler activity is compared against the baseline after launch How to verify. Confirm the same bots are reaching the new URLs at a similar rate. None of this appears in GA4, so it has to come from server-level capture.

Monitoring

Redirects are re-verified on live URLs after cutover How to verify. Re-run the full map against production. Server configuration differences between staging and production are common and quiet.
Traffic and revenue are compared at template level, not in aggregate How to verify. Break performance out by page type. A flat sitewide number can hide one template collapsing.
404s are monitored from real requests, not guessed How to verify. Watch server logs and Search Console for 404s with actual traffic or inbound links, and add redirects for the ones that matter.
Index coverage is tracked across a full crawl cycle How to verify. Watch indexed page counts and coverage errors for at least six weeks. Losses appear as engines recrawl, not on launch day.
Crawlers are confirmed reaching the new URLs in the logs How to verify. Filter server logs by verified crawler and confirm they are fetching new URLs rather than looping through redirects or hammering 404s.
The migration is reviewed against a defined success measure How to verify. Compare against the pre-migration baseline on a date agreed in advance, so the project closes against numbers rather than against a general sense that it went fine.

Want a second set of eyes before you cut over?

This is the checklist we run on client migrations. If you would rather not run it alone, or you want the redirect map reviewed at catalog scale, that is the work we do.

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The Website Migration Checklist

Spec

URL inventory

URL structure

Redirect mapping

Internationalization

AI channel

Pre-launch

Redirect mapping

Crawlability

Content parity

Structured data

Internationalization

Performance

AI channel

Launch day

Launch day

Post-launch

AI channel

Monitoring

Want a second set of eyes before you cut over?

It's Now Safer to Put Cloudflare in Front of Shopify: What O2O Fixed, and What the Warnings Still Mean

The Website Migration Checklist

Spec

URL inventory

URL structure

Redirect mapping

Internationalization

AI channel

Pre-launch

Redirect mapping

Crawlability

Content parity

Structured data

Internationalization

Performance

AI channel

Launch day

Launch day

Post-launch

AI channel

Monitoring

Want a second set of eyes before you cut over?