Inventory the current site
Export URLs from your sitemap, crawl, and analytics. Identify pages with meaningful traffic, links, and business value. Include product, category, resource, and campaign pages.
Map old URLs to useful destinations
Prepare redirects for changed URLs. Match pages to their closest relevant replacement rather than sending everything to the homepage. Check redirect chains and broken destinations.
Preserve useful signals
Review page titles, descriptions, headings, canonical URLs, internal links, and structured data. Plan how out-of-stock and discontinued products should be handled.
Check launch controls
Verify robots directives, page status codes, sitemaps, and indexability. Keep staging private; ensure staging restrictions are removed from the intended public production pages.
Monitor after launch
Check crawling, indexing, redirect errors, key landing-page traffic, and conversions. Investigate changes with both technical and business context. Even a carefully planned migration can produce ranking fluctuations.