We've seen too many brands lose 40 to 70% of their organic traffic the month after a migration. The cause: 95% of the time it's broken redirects and lost content. Here's the checklist we follow.
Before migration: crawl everything
We crawl the legacy site with Screaming Frog, export every URL with its GA4 traffic, Ahrefs backlinks, average ranking. Any URL with >50 visits/month or >10 backlinks must redirect 301 to its functional equivalent - not to the home page.
“Exhaustive crawl BEFORE migration, targeted 301 redirects (never to the home page).”
During migration: preserve the signals
We copy each product/collection page keeping H1, meta-title, meta-description and URL handle if possible. Schemas (Product, BreadcrumbList, FAQPage) are rebuilt on day 1, not 'later'.
Images lose their ranking if you rename files. Keep original filenames when possible, or map image redirects.
After migration: monitor for 90 days
Sitemap submitted within 24h. We watch coverage in Search Console daily for the first 30 days, then weekly until day 90. Any drop above 15% on a category triggers an immediate investigation.