The website migration checklist. Nothing left behind.
Use this checklist to move a website to a new platform without losing pages, traffic or trust. It covers the inventory before you start, the plan and the redirect map, moving and checking content, the checks before launch, the launch itself and what to watch in the weeks after.
How to use it
Work through the groups in order; they follow the life of a migration. Give every item an owner and a date, and treat an unchecked item in an earlier group as a reason to pause, not to push on.
The checklist works for any enterprise platform: Sitecore, Optimizely, Contentful or anything else.
What usually goes wrong
- Redirects missing for pages nobody remembered.
- Staging settings left on, hiding the new site from search.
- Content clean-up left until the last week.
- Integrations tested last, when there’s no time to fix them.
Let someone else run it
Cypher’s migration playbook runs these steps in order, logs each one, and hands you the evidence: content parity of 98% or better, every redirect kept, and visual parity at three breakpoints. You approve the plan and sign off the launch.
Before you start
- Inventory every URL from a site crawl, your analytics and your XML sitemap.
- Note your top pages by traffic, conversions and links from other sites.
- Decide which pages to keep, merge or retire.
- Agree who owns each section of content.
- Record current rankings and traffic as a benchmark.
- List every integration: forms, search, CRM, analytics, sign-in, commerce.
- Agree what “done” means: content parity, accessibility, performance.
- Name one person who makes the decisions.
Plan and build
- Write the plan: templates, components, content model and redirects.
- Get the plan approved before anyone builds.
- Build each template and component once, then reuse it.
- Map every old URL to its new URL in a redirect map.
- Carry over titles, meta descriptions, headings, alt text and structured data.
- Set up analytics and consent on the new site.
- Write the editor guide as you build, not after.
Move and check
- Move content into the new templates.
- Compare old and new page by page for content parity.
- Check pages look right on phone, tablet and desktop.
- Test every form and integration end to end.
- Run accessibility and performance checks on every template.
- Fix broken links and missing images.
- List anything not done, and why.
Launch
- Plan a content freeze, or a re-sync for anything published during the move.
- Deploy the redirects at the same moment as the new site.
- Remove staging settings: noindex tags and a robots.txt that blocks search engines.
- Submit the new XML sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
- Spot-check your top pages and their old URLs by hand.
- Confirm analytics is recording.
- Have a rollback plan, and someone watching.
- Get sign-off from the named owner.
The weeks after
- Watch crawl errors and 404s, and add redirects for anything missed.
- Fix redirect chains and loops.
- Compare traffic and rankings with your benchmark, page by page.
- Keep the redirects in place permanently.
- Review the list of anything not done, and schedule the fixes.
- Retire the old platform only once nothing depends on it.
Questions people ask
Do we have to migrate every page?
No. Retiring outdated pages is often a good idea, as long as each retired URL redirects to the closest relevant page.
Who should own the checklist?
One person, usually the marketing project lead, with a named owner for each item.
Is there a template for the redirects?
Yes. The redirect map template is a free CSV with the columns you need.