Surviving a site migration without losing organic traffic
NEO Campus Editorial14 April 20266 min read
Migrations are where good SEO careers die. With the right checklist they are routine; without one they can wipe out years of equity in a week.
Map every URL
Crawl the live site, export every indexable URL, and define a 1:1 redirect to the new structure. Catch-all redirects to the homepage are the classic mistake.
Stage and test
Crawl the staging environment, validate redirects, schema, canonicals, and internal links before the cutover. Do not discover problems in production.
Monitor for 90 days
Watch index coverage, rankings, and log files daily for the first two weeks, weekly for the next ten. Small regressions caught early are recoverable.
