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SEO · 9 min read

A pre-flight checklist for site migrations that keeps rankings

Migrations lose traffic for predictable reasons. Here is the checklist we run before every launch.

By Naledi Khumalo · 29 April 2026

Traffic loss after a migration is almost never mysterious. It is a redirect map that was never crawled, a staging robots.txt that shipped to production, or internal links that quietly changed shape.

Crawl the old site fully before anything is switched. Map every indexed URL that has traffic, links or conversions to a destination. Anything without a one-to-one destination needs an explicit decision, not a homepage redirect.

After launch, crawl again within the hour, then daily for two weeks. Most migration disasters are recoverable if caught in the first 72 hours.

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