Website Migration Checklist: How to Switch Platforms Without Losing Rankings

This website migration checklist covers what a team needs to switch platforms without losing rankings: benchmark the old site, map every content field and URL, move a tested sample of content first, rebuild forms and tracking, test on staging, and watch Search Console for 30 days after launch.

A platform switch puts more at risk than a redesign. URLs change to fit the new platform, the content has to come out of one CMS and go into another, and the tags that report on your leads have to be rebuilt. Each of those steps can cost traffic your team spent years earning.

We give the content and tracking phases the same attention as the redirects, because those are the phases where migrations lose the most traffic.

What Changes When You Switch Platforms

A website migration is any move that changes a site's platform, domain, or URL structure. This checklist covers the platform switch: moving from WordPress, HubSpot CMS, or a custom build to a new CMS such as Webflow.

A redesign keeps the platform and changes the design. A platform migration changes where every page, field, and file lives. If you're redesigning on the platform you already have, use our Website Redesign SEO Checklist instead.

Here's how the work differs:

Website Migration SEO: Why Rankings Drop After a Platform Switch

Rankings drop after a platform switch when Google can't match the old pages to the new ones, or when the new pages lose content, titles, or links the old ones had. Four problems cause most of the loss:

• URLs change to fit the new platform. Webflow, for example, keeps every CMS item inside a folder, such as /blog/post-name. Posts that sat at the root of the old domain get new addresses, and each one needs a redirect.
• Content or fields get lost in the export. Custom fields, tables, and embedded media often come through an export broken or empty.
• SEO data lives in a plugin. On WordPress, titles and meta descriptions often sit in a plugin such as Yoast. If nobody maps those fields, the new pages launch with default titles.
• Tracking breaks, so nobody sees the drop. When tags and forms stop working, the team loses the data it needs to spot a problem early.

Google also needs time to process any move. Its own guidance says a medium-sized site can take a few weeks or more for the new URLs to replace the old ones in search results.

Each phase below protects against one of these problems. It's the process our website migration services follow, written out so your team can run it or check the work of the team running it.

The Website Migration Checklist, Phase by Phase

The checklist has seven phases and 31 steps. It covers the SEO steps (redirects, metadata, and sitemaps) and the build steps that protect them (content export, forms, and tracking), in the order a team runs them.

Use it as an SEO migration checklist and a project plan at the same time, and give each phase an owner before the project starts.

Phase 1: Plan and Benchmark Before You Migrate

Phase 1 records what the old site earns today, so you can measure the new site against it. Every site migration checklist starts here.

1. Confirm the new platform fits your team. Check that the new CMS can hold every content type you publish and that your marketing team can publish without a developer. Our Webflow vs. WordPress comparison covers the most common choice.
2. Crawl every URL on the old site. Use a crawler such as Screaming Frog to export every page, PDF, and image URL with its title, meta description, H1, and status code. This list becomes your redirect map.
3. Export your Search Console data. Save clicks, impressions, and average position by page and by query for the last 12 months. You'll compare the new site with these numbers after launch.
4. Mark your most valuable pages. List the pages that bring in the most organic traffic, the most leads, and the most links from other websites. A person checks these pages by hand in every phase.
5. Set a content freeze date. Pick the date after which nobody publishes or edits pages on the old site. Anything published after the export won't reach the new site.

Phase 2: Map Your Content Model and URLs

A content model is the list of content types on your site and the fields each one uses. Map it before anyone starts the build, because the build follows it.

1. List every content type and field. Blog posts, case studies, resources, and team pages each have their own fields: author, date, category, summary, related posts, and any custom fields a developer added.
2. Map each old field to a field in the new CMS. Write down where every field goes, and which fields you'll drop because the new platform handles them another way.
3. Set URL rules the new platform allows. Each platform has its own rules for URLs. Webflow, for example, keeps every CMS item inside a collection folder, such as /blog/post-name. Decide which URLs stay the same and which ones change.
4. Build a one-to-one redirect map. Every old URL gets one 301 redirect to its closest new page. A 301 tells search engines the page has moved permanently. Keep the map in a spreadsheet with two columns: old path and new path. Webflow imports redirects from a CSV file with those two columns.
5. Never send old pages to the homepage. A redirect to the homepage tells Google the old content is gone. If a page has no match, send it to the closest section page, or let it return a 404 if it has no traffic or links.
6. Plan to keep the redirects for at least a year. Google recommends keeping redirects as long as possible, and generally for at least one year. Add the redirects the old site already runs, so old links don't break a second time.

Phase 3: Export, Clean, and Move the Content

This phase is where a platform switch differs most from a redesign, and most published checklists skip it. A CMS migration checklist has to cover how the content leaves the old system and enters the new one.

As our lead developer, Lucas Ramalho, puts it, “Data can be in any shape and form, and we need to figure out a way to actually move that over.”

1. Export in a format the new CMS can read. WordPress exports XML, and the Webflow CMS imports CSV, so the export has to be converted first. For a static HTML site, the pages get rebuilt instead, which our HTML to Webflow conversion service covers.
2. Clean out code the new platform can't use. Shortcodes, page builder markup, and theme styles come through as broken text. Remove them before the import.
3. Fix special characters. Curly quotes, accents, and symbols can break a CSV file. Check a few rows by hand before you import everything.
4. Upload images and move hosted video. Upload every image to the new platform, so no page still loads images from the old server. Videos hosted on the old site need a new home, such as YouTube or Vimeo, before the old server is switched off.
5. Rebuild tables, embeds, and headings. Tables and embedded content often break in an export. Headings from the old theme may also need new levels to fit the new design. Check each one on your most valuable pages.
6. Move a sample first and approve it. Import a small batch of pages, compare them with the originals, and approve them before you move the rest. We use scripts to compare old and new pages, and a person approves every sample. “It's really important for us to have a human gate in every step,” says our lead developer.

If your site has thousands of posts or custom fields, we can run this phase with your team.

Phase 4: Rebuild Forms and Tracking

On a B2B site, this phase protects your leads. Forms, tags, and integrations can stop working at launch, and nobody notices until the pipeline report looks wrong.

1. Map every Google Tag Manager tag in a spreadsheet. List each tag, what triggers it, and what it reports. We map and check every tag on every migration, and our analytics and Google Tag Manager setup team can fix tracking gaps during the move.
2. Rebuild your conversion events. Demo requests, contact forms, and content downloads should report the same events in GA4 on the new site as on the old one.
3. Send a test lead through every form. Submit each form on the staging site and confirm the lead reaches your CRM with every field filled in.
4. Check chat, cookie consent, and ad pixels. These scripts sit outside the CMS and are easy to miss. List them in the same spreadsheet as your tags.

Phase 5: Test Everything on Staging

Staging is a private copy of the new site. Test everything there, before anyone outside the team can see it.

1. Protect the staging site with a password. A robots.txt rule alone can still let a page appear in search if another site links to it.
2. Crawl the staging site. Look for 404 errors, missing titles, broken images, and pages with the wrong canonical tag.
3. Test every redirect. Each old URL should reach its new page in one step. A redirect that points to another redirect is called a chain; fix every chain before launch.
4. Compare titles, meta descriptions, headings, and schema. Check your most valuable pages against the Phase 1 crawl. They should match unless you changed them on purpose.
5. Check page speed on your main templates. Run your homepage, a blog post, and a landing page through PageSpeed Insights, and fix large images or scripts before launch.

Phase 6: Launch Day

Launch day is short when the earlier phases are done. Keep the people who own each phase available for the first few hours.

1. Switch the DNS and remove the staging protection. Point your domain to the new platform, then remove any password or noindex setting from the live site.
2. Turn on the redirects. Upload or confirm the full redirect map, then test a sample of old URLs from the Phase 1 crawl.
3. Submit the new sitemap in Search Console. Google recommends this step after every move, so it can find the new URLs quickly.
4. Use the Change of Address tool only if the domain changed. Google says the tool is for moves from one domain or subdomain to another. A platform switch on the same domain doesn't need it.
5. Check your top 20 pages by hand. Open each one, submit its forms, and confirm the tags fire.

Phase 7: The First 90 Days After Launch

Some movement in rankings is normal after a move. The goal in this phase is to tell normal movement from real damage, and to fix the damage fast.

• Week 1, every day: check the Pages report in Search Console for 404 errors and pages that aren't indexed, and check your form submissions and lead counts.
• Weeks 2 to 4, every week: compare clicks, impressions, and positions for your most valuable pages with the Phase 1 export. We track Search Console against this baseline for the first 30 days of every migration we run.
• Days 30 to 90, every month: confirm that traffic is returning to the baseline and that old URLs are leaving the search results.

Normal movement looks like this: impressions shift for a few weeks while Google processes the redirects, and positions go up and down across many pages at once.

Damage looks different. One important page loses its rankings and stays down, 404 errors appear for URLs that used to get traffic, or leads stop arriving. Each of those points to a specific missed redirect, field, or tag, and your Phase 1 data shows where to look.

When to Bring In a Migration Partner

Website migration best practices are the same at any size. The amount of work grows with the site. Consider outside help when:

• The site has thousands of URLs, or several sites are merging into one
• Posts use custom fields, tables, or content built by plugins
• The move includes a redesign
• Forms and tracking feed a CRM that your sales team depends on

We've built 500+ Webflow sites as a Webflow Enterprise Partner. As a website migration agency, we run every phase in this checklist with your team, from the first crawl to the 30-day check. Keep this SEO checklist for website migration open during the project, whoever runs it.

Frequently Asked Questions About Website Migration

How do you migrate a website without losing SEO?

Map every old URL to a new one with a single 301 redirect, carry over titles, meta descriptions, and headings, and move every content field. Test all of it on a staging site before launch. After launch, compare Search Console data with the numbers you recorded before the move, so any drop traces to specific pages.

How long does a website migration take?

It depends on the number of URLs, how much content moves, and whether the move includes a redesign. Our Scientist.com migration moved 1,200+ posts from four sites into one and launched in about 10 weeks. The inventory and redirect work sets most of the timeline, so start those first.

How long does it take for rankings to recover after a migration?

Google says a medium-sized site can take a few weeks or more for its new URLs to replace the old ones, and larger sites can take longer. Rankings move during that time. If one important page stays down after a few weeks, check its redirect, title, and content first.

Should we change our URLs during a migration?

Keep URLs the same wherever the new platform allows it, because every changed URL needs a redirect. Some changes are required: Webflow, for example, keeps CMS items inside a folder like /blog/post-name. When a URL has to change, give it one 301 redirect to its new address.

Is a website migration the same as a redesign?

A redesign changes how a site looks and is organized on the same platform. A website migration moves the site to a new platform, domain, or URL structure, so content, SEO fields, and tracking all have to move as well. Many projects do both at once, which adds to the SEO work.

How long should we keep 301 redirects after a migration?

Google recommends keeping redirects for as long as possible, and generally for at least one year. Many teams leave them in place permanently, because links from other websites keep pointing to the old URLs. Removing redirects early turns those links into 404 errors for visitors and search engines.