Updated February 2025
Migrating your site is exciting, but make sure you protect your existing site performance along the way.
Among the key steps to build and prepare your site for launch, search engine optimization (SEO) ranks as one of the most important. How well you prepare can positively or negatively impact the ultimate results.
That’s why we’ve curated a detailed migration and launch preparation checklist for SEO.
Note: The actual steps will vary for each organization. Contact WordPress VIP Support with any questions.
How migrations impact SEO
Traffic and search engine rankings may temporarily decline during a site migration. Search engines like Google need time to crawl and index the new site and reacquaint themselves with its new structure and domain. This recalibration also takes into account the new site’s relevance and authority.
Proper migration execution, including setting up 301 redirects and maintaining content quality, can help minimize the impact. Done correctly, the migrated site should recover its previous visibility and rankings over time.
WordPress VIP makes migration easy
With WordPress VIP, many crucial functions—security, caching, and dynamic sizing—are built into the platform, so you don’t have to worry about them. We provide a temporary convenience URL during migration that comes with hard coded `/robots.txt` output that returns:
```
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
```
These settings are intended to prevent search engines from indexing content hosted on unlaunched production sites.
Site speed is a major factor in improving SEO performance, which is why WordPress VIP offers built-in infrastructure features to enhance site speed, including:
Uptime is also important for SEO value calculations. If your site is on an unstable platform, your SEO performance suffers. This is where WordPress VIP stands out above the rest.
Pre-launch SEO checklist
Over time, your site (and each URL) develops an SEO value to search engines. It’s important to protect that credibility when you migrate your site; otherwise, you may experience a drop in traffic. Multiple ways exist to avoid a negative hit to your SEO value before migrating.
1. Establish a strategy
Setting goals, benchmarks, and timelines is critical for a successful migration and maintaining site performance.
Gather site metrics before the migration to establish benchmarks to compare against post-migration. Define KPIs, such as traffic, bounce rate, and conversion rates, to track performance and identify improvement areas before and after the migration.
Meanwhile, create a roadmap with timelines for testing, audits, and the actual migration to minimize disruptions. This structured approach effectively manages resources, keeps the project on track, and aligns stakeholders with migration objectives.
2. Perform a content audit
While content audits can be overwhelming, they’re also necessary to ensure SEO performance during a site migration. During the audit, you should identify:
- Top-performing pages and posts (organic traffic, search referrals, etc.)
- Top-converting pages and posts (or content with the highest ROI)
- Redundant, trivial, or obsolete (ROT) content
Tracking this content performance pre- and post-launch will help gauge overall site performance and provide a list of “priority” pages to check during quality assurance.
3. Evaluate redirects and deletion
With content audit insights, you can decide whether content should be redirected, retired, or optimized. For example, content with low sessions, no keyword rankings, and no backlinks is probably outdated and can be safely retired using a 410 status code to indicate permanent deletion.
Content with decent backlinks and rankings but low sessions may still hold value and should be optimized and migrated.
Redirect content with a newer equivalent using a 301 redirect to preserve SEO value. This process ensures a smooth transition, maintains SEO performance, and improves user experience. A 301 redirect tells the search engine that a page has moved.
In a perfect world, you change your URL structures as little as possible. However, you’ll likely need to be flexible during migration, so implement 301 redirects when needed. To implement redirects on WordPress VIP, use Safe Redirect Manager or WPCOM Legacy Redirector (for large quantities).
4. Organize your analytics tools
Measuring what matters is important before and after launch. Confirm your analytics tools of choice are installed and running smoothly on your site between migration and launch.
Use Google Tag Manager to implement Google Analytics. Work with your Parse.ly team to confirm that Parse.ly is implemented correctly. Confirming your analytics are in place before launch will ensure you don’t lose important data.
VIP TIP: Not a Parse.ly customer yet? Learn how our customers use Google Analytics and Parse.ly in tandem to fortify their content strategy.
5. Optimize on-page content
On-page content optimization is essential to protecting SEO performance during site migration. Pre-launch, we recommend confirming that:
- Page titles and meta descriptions are in place
- There are no duplicate H1s throughout the site
- There is an HTML and XML sitemap available for the search engines to crawl
- Internal page linking is working properly (no 404 errors)
6. Create and manage a staging site
Create a copy of your live site, known as a staging site. Here, web managers can safely test the new site architecture without affecting the current site. This controlled environment allows them to identify and resolve issues such as broken links or navigation problems before pushing the new site live, ensuring a smoother migration.
Initially, use password protection and noindex page tags to block search engines from crawling and indexing your staging site. This will prevent duplicate content issues and confusion in search engine rankings. Later, temporarily allow crawlers to access the staging site to ensure the architecture is correctly understood before final launch.
7. Lower your TTL settings
We recommend reducing Time to Live (TTL) of a domain’s DNS records to 300 seconds at least one day before launching a site. This streamlines propagation when the IP/CNAME/A record is changed at launch time; most browsers will be directed to the newly launched site within a few minutes of launch.
8. Add your domain to the VIP Dashboard
To help prepare for launch, add your domain on the Domains panel of the VIP Dashboard.
Launch day checklist
Once all the preparation work is complete, it’s time to launch! Launching a new site on WordPress VIP is easy with our self-launch feature in the VIP Dashboard. Take the following steps to ensure a successful launch.
1. Launch the site in the VIP Dashboard
Visit your WordPress VIP Dashboard and access the self-launch tool. Follow the steps under “Launch Your Application” and mark your site as “Launched.”
2. Ensure that the staging site is ready
Before your staging site becomes “the new site,” perform final QA checks. This includes reviewing how the site looks and performs on various platforms and devices, whether it‘s legally compliant based on your privacy policy, and whether all extraneous URLs have been removed.
Remove password protections to allow Googlebot to access your site. Verify your site on GSC and make sure all pages with no-index directives show that. Address any other indexation or technical issues. Once everything is confirmed, ensure the site remains publicly accessible while keeping necessary security measures in place.
3. Make adjustments on the necessary platforms
After launching your site, confirm it’s connected to Google Search Console (GSC) and submit the site for indexation. Connecting your site to GSC will help maintain your site’s Google presence in the Google search landscape and keep you updated on site errors, security issues, and search rankings.
If you operate Pay-per-Click (PPC) ads in Google Ads, now’s a good time to update them with your new URL so they are approved. In Google Analytics, add an annotation of your site launch to make it easier to benchmark traffic patterns before and after launch. If you use Parse.ly, note the launch date for historical comparisons.
4. Update external links
Reach out to partners, syndicated content hosts, etc., to ensure all links living on their channels are current. You may also need to update links on your social channels, apps, or other places with inbound links to your site.
Post-launch: SEO is never done
A migration isn’t a one-and-done exercise. Always keep SEO top of mind even after a successful launch, as content strategy best practices are ever-changing.
Monitor keyword rankings
After migration, monitor keyword rankings closely, tracking changes to your target keywords. If you notice significant drops, investigate potential causes like broken links, missing redirects, or changes in content relevance.
Check for platform issues
Conduct thorough testing across all platforms and devices to ensure the site functions as expected. This includes checking for broken links and ensuring responsive design elements work on mobile devices. Verify that all interactive features are operational. Address any technical issues promptly to provide a seamless user experience and maintain site credibility.
Submit new sitemaps
Update and submit new XML sitemaps to search engines to help them understand the new site structure. To optimize crawling and indexing, ensure the sitemaps reflect the current URLs and exclude outdated or irrelevant pages.
File for change of address with Google
If your migration involves a domain change, use Google Search Console to file a change of address. This informs Google of the new domain and helps transfer SEO signals from the old domain to the new one. It’s crucial for maintaining search rankings and ensuring a smooth transition in search engine results.
Transfer third-party licenses
From analytics tools to marketing automation platforms, review all third-party services, plugins, and licenses associated with your website. Ensure they’re transferred and configured correctly on the new site to avoid data collection and service delivery disruptions.
How WordPress VIP can help with migrations
Migrating an enterprise website can be intimidating and complex. But it doesn’t have to be with the right guidance and expertise.
Site migration experts, WordPress VIP, can make the transition seamless to our enterprise-grade CMS with checklists, guides, advice, and expert guidance from our Professional Services team and technology partners.
Migration case studies
Read more about the benefits of migrating to WordPress VIP. Learn how:
- Everhance, one of the largest publishers on the web, improved its site speed and reliability.
- Capgemini, a multi-billion dollar international consultancy, migrated 38 sites, boosting productivity across the board.
“The reassurances of uptime are there. There’s no more worry of waking up at 2 a.m. to see that the site has had an outage.”
—Ramsey Mohsen, CEO, Everhance
