# Website migration checklist

VERQEN — www.verqenconsulting.com
Start four to eight weeks before launch.

## Before migration
1. [ ] Crawl the old site completely, rendering enabled
2. [ ] Export indexed URLs
3. [ ] Export Search Console pages and queries (full available history)
4. [ ] Export GA4 landing pages, sessions, conversions and revenue
5. [ ] Export backlinks by target URL
6. [ ] Identify revenue and conversion pages
7. [ ] Score every URL: clicks, conversions, revenue, referring domains, query value
8. [ ] Sort by score and cut into deciles
9. [ ] Map old to new — rules where a pattern exists, explicit pairs where it does not
10. [ ] Check metadata preservation on templates serving deciles 1–3
11. [ ] Check canonical strategy on the new build
12. [ ] Check internal links point at new URLs
13. [ ] Plan sitemaps, segmented by page type
14. [ ] Plan robots.txt for BOTH environments
15. [ ] Write the launch checklist with owners and pass/fail criteria

## Redirect map validation (the step most projects skip)
- [ ] Test the map against the full scored URL list, not a sample
- [ ] Report coverage WEIGHTED BY VALUE, per decile — not by URL count
- [ ] 100% destination coverage for deciles 1–3
- [ ] Single hop, correct status code, destination returns 200

## Launch day
1. [ ] Status codes across the scored URL set
2. [ ] Redirect behaviour: single hop, correct target, correct code
3. [ ] Canonicals on the new templates
4. [ ] robots.txt on production; staging closed
5. [ ] Sitemap accurate and submitted
6. [ ] Analytics firing
7. [ ] Conversions recording, exactly once
8. [ ] Critical pages indexable
9. [ ] Server response times under real traffic
10. [ ] Rollback triggers evaluated against criteria, not feelings

## After launch
- Day 1 — critical QA on the scored URL set
- Day 3 — indexing and error monitoring
- Day 7 — traffic comparison against baseline
- Day 14 — page-level comparison, cohort by cohort
- Day 30 — full report: what value was retained, what was not, and the fix backlog

## If you only have two weeks
1. [ ] Score the URLs (a rough score beats a URL count)
2. [ ] Map deciles 1–3 correctly
3. [ ] Validate analytics with real actions
4. [ ] Close staging, open production
5. [ ] Write the launch checklist
6. [ ] Say out loud what you are skipping