Moving to a new CMS is one of the riskiest things you can do to a website’s search traffic. Not because search engines dislike change, but because migrations tend to break things quietly: URLs change without redirects, page titles get lost, internal links point to old addresses, and important pages simply do not make it across.

The good news is that almost all of this is preventable with planning. This is the checklist we work through on every migration, whether it is WordPress to Webflow, a Drupal 7 site that has reached end of life, or a store moving between Shopify and WooCommerce.

1. Take a full snapshot of the current site

Before anything changes, record exactly what you have. You will refer back to this throughout the project and for weeks after launch.

  • Crawl the whole site with a tool such as Screaming Frog or Sitebulb and export every URL, status code, title, meta description, heading and canonical tag.
  • Export the list of pages that receive search traffic from Google Search Console, along with their main queries.
  • Export top landing pages from your analytics.
  • Download any existing redirect rules from the current CMS, plugins or server configuration.
  • Save the current XML sitemap and robots.txt file.
  • Note which pages have backlinks from other sites, using Search Console or a backlink tool.

This snapshot is your baseline. Without it, you cannot tell whether a drop in traffic after launch is caused by the migration or something else.

2. Decide what moves, what merges and what goes

A migration is a good moment to tidy up, but cut carefully. Sort every URL into one of four groups:

  • Keep: moves across with the same or an equivalent URL.
  • Merge: combined with a related page, with the old URL redirected to the new one.
  • Remove and redirect: no longer needed, redirected to the closest relevant page.
  • Remove completely: genuinely obsolete with no traffic or links, allowed to return a 404 or 410.

Be cautious with pages that look unimportant but bring in steady search traffic or have external links. Old blog posts are often in this category.

3. Build a URL map

The URL map is the single most important document in a migration. It is a spreadsheet with every old URL in one column and its new destination in the next.

Wherever possible, keep URLs the same. Every platform has its own conventions, though. Shopify uses fixed prefixes such as /products/ and /collections/, and Webflow CMS items sit under their collection’s path. When URLs must change, map each one to its closest equivalent rather than sending everything to the homepage.

Redirecting large numbers of old pages to the homepage is one of the most common migration mistakes. Search engines tend to treat these as soft 404s, so the value those pages built up is largely lost.

4. Carry over on-page SEO

Content often moves across but its SEO details do not. For every page that is kept, check that the new version has:

  • The same or an improved title tag and meta description.
  • The same main heading and body content, unless you are deliberately rewriting it.
  • Image alt text.
  • Correct canonical tags.
  • Structured data, such as product, article, FAQ or organisation markup, if the old site used it.
  • Hreflang tags for multilingual sites.
  • Open Graph and social sharing tags.

Where content is moved by script, check a sample of pages by hand. Automated imports regularly drop formatting, mangle special characters or lose fields that do not map neatly.

Internal links inside your content will still point to old URLs after import. Redirects will catch them, but chains of redirects slow things down and dilute signals. Update internal links to point straight at the new URLs.

Do the same for images and files. If media is moving to a new location, make sure PDFs and other documents that are linked from elsewhere are redirected too.

6. Test on staging before launch

Build the new site on a staging environment that search engines cannot index, usually by password protection, and test thoroughly:

  1. Run every URL from the URL map against staging and confirm each redirect lands on the right page with a single 301.
  2. Crawl staging and compare titles, descriptions, headings and canonicals with your baseline.
  3. Check that the XML sitemap only lists live, indexable URLs.
  4. Test forms, search, checkout and any integrations.
  5. Compare page speed and Core Web Vitals with the old site.
  6. Confirm analytics and tag manager are installed and recording correctly.

7. Launch day

Plan launch for a quiet period, never just before a sale or campaign. On the day:

  • Remove staging password protection and any noindex settings. This is easy to forget and very damaging if missed.
  • Check robots.txt allows crawling.
  • Put redirects live and test a sample of the most important ones straight away.
  • Submit the new XML sitemap in Google Search Console.
  • If the domain is changing, use the change of address tool in Search Console.
  • Crawl the live site and check for broken links and unexpected 404s.

8. Watch closely for the first few weeks

Some movement in rankings after a migration is normal while search engines recrawl the site. What you are looking for is anything that does not settle.

  • Check Search Console daily at first for crawl errors, indexing problems and pages dropping out.
  • Compare traffic to key landing pages against your baseline.
  • Review server logs or 404 reports for old URLs you missed, and add redirects for them.
  • Keep the old redirect rules in place permanently, not just for a few months.

A note on platform-specific issues

Each platform has its own quirks. Moving from WordPress often means dealing with years of plugin-generated pages, tag archives and attachment URLs. Moving off Drupal 7, which reached end of life in January 2025, usually involves complex content types that need careful mapping to the new system. Ecommerce migrations need product, variant and collection URLs mapped one by one, along with customer accounts and order history where the platform allows.

Plan for these early. They are rarely difficult, but they take time.

Planning a migration?

If you are about to change platforms and want a careful plan for your URLs and rankings, get in touch and we will help you map it out.