Website migration checklist

Moving a website is mostly bookkeeping. Nothing on this list is hard; the damage comes from the step nobody wrote down. This is the list we use on every migration at nine75, whether it is Wix to WordPress, one host to another, or a rebuild on the same domain.

How to use it

Tick items as you finish them. The ticks save in your browser, so you can close the tab and come back tomorrow. If you want a copy for the client or the old agency, print the page; the boxes print too.

Do the steps in order. The first 5 happen before anything moves and take the longest. Steps 6 to 9 are the move itself; on a small site that is one afternoon. Steps 10 to 12 are the month after, when the real problems show up.

Before the move

The inventory is the step people skip. Crawl the old site with a free crawler, export the list, and add anything the crawler cannot see: PDFs linked from emails, landing pages from old ads, the page your accountant bookmarked. Every URL on that list needs a destination, even if the destination is a redirect to the home page.

Redirects come next. Write the map as a 2-column spreadsheet, old and new, and get the client to check it. If the old site has any search traffic at all, this spreadsheet is worth more than the new design.

The move

Build the new site on the new host first, on a temporary address. Lower the DNS TTL 2 days ahead, so the change spreads in minutes rather than a day. Then point the domain, turn on TLS, and test the forms from a phone on mobile data, not from the office Wi-Fi.

Email is the usual casualty. If the domain’s mail runs through the old host, move the MX records with care or leave them where they are. Check this before you touch DNS, not after.

After the move

Send the sitemap to Search Console and read the coverage report the next morning. Watch the 404 log for a month; the long tail of old links takes that long to appear. Keep the old site alive, unlinked, for the same 30 days. It costs one more month of hosting, and it is the only backup that is known to work.

If you would rather hand this to us, migration starts at Nu. 5,000 and takes about a week. Tell us what you’re moving →