A migration done well is invisible: traffic never notices. The ones that go wrong are visible for months. This checklist walks through the 5 phases of a migration with the 30 checkpoints I review on enterprise projects, in order and with their criticality level, so nothing is left to whoever happens to be at lunch on launch day.
5 phases · 15 critical checkpoints
The checklist is interactive: tick each checkpoint and watch overall and per-phase progress update in real time.
What's inside
Reason and scope, a frozen benchmark, a URL inventory, and what gets migrated, consolidated or retired.
Staging locked behind authentication, 1:1 URL mapping, indexable templates and a crawl compared against the live site.
301s for everything with traffic, backlinks or rankings, no chains or loops, and internal links pointing at the new URLs.
Indexing unblocked, new robots.txt verified, sitemaps in place and error monitoring during the first 48 hours.
Indexing versus the benchmark week by week, ranking alerts, 404s with residual traffic and a closing report at 8 weeks.
Of all the troubled migrations I've been asked to review, most didn't fail because of anything sophisticated. They failed because of a noindex left over from staging, a copied robots.txt or redirects written the night before.
Those are checklist mistakes, and that's why the answer is a checklist.
Ana Fernández, enterprise SEO consultant
Start here
Drop your name and email and the checklist unlocks instantly on this page. No waiting for an email.
Yes: domain, CMS, redesign or architecture. Any point that doesn't apply to your case can simply be ticked off.
Ideally during planning, weeks before the switch. Phases 1 and 2 are the ones that prevent the most problems.
No, it runs entirely in your browser. We only ask for name and email to give you access.
Phase 5 works as a diagnostic: check those 6 points first, that's where the most common cause is.
The checklist keeps the process in order. On enterprise projects we can run the full migration with you, from URL mapping to post-launch monitoring.
Let's talk