Picture a marketing lead on launch day. The new WordPress site looks perfect, the team is celebrating, and two weeks later organic traffic is down by half. Nobody broke anything on purpose. Someone simply forgot to redirect 400 old blog URLs, and Google treated the new site like a stranger.
That’s the thing about migrations. The design gets all the attention, while the details that protect your rankings sit quietly in a spreadsheet nobody opens. Here’s the checklist we wish every team followed.
Before you move a single file
Most traffic losses are decided before the migration even starts. Skip this part and you’re flying blind. So start with a full picture of what you have today:
- Crawl the old site and export every indexable URL;
- Pull top pages and queries from Google Search Console;
- Record current rankings for your most valuable keywords;
- Save page titles, meta descriptions and structured data;
- Note your internal linking and any pages with strong backlinks;
- Benchmark Core Web Vitals so you can compare later.
Build the redirect map
This is the step that makes or breaks a WordPress migration. Every old URL needs a clear 301 to its closest match on the new site, not a lazy redirect to the homepage. Yes, it’s tedious. It’s also the difference between keeping your rankings and starting from zero.
Watch out for redirect chains, mixed trailing slashes and old category or tag archives. They’re small issues on their own. Together they can confuse crawlers for months.
Launch day, step by step
- Keep the staging site blocked from indexing until the last minute;
- Then remove the noindex tag and check robots.txt twice;
- Switch DNS during your lowest traffic window;
- Submit the new XML sitemap in Search Console;
- Test forms, checkout and tracking scripts;
- Spot-check redirects for your top 50 pages.
By the way, keep the old server alive for a week or two. If something goes wrong, you’ll be glad you have a fallback. It costs little and buys a lot of peace of mind.
The first 30 days after launch
A small dip right after launch is normal, so don’t panic. What you’re looking for is a steady recovery. Check crawl errors daily in the first week, then weekly. If key pages lose positions and don’t bounce back, look at missing content, changed headings or broken internal links first.
DIY or bring in the pros
A small brochure site with 20 pages? You can probably handle it yourself with a good plugin. A WooCommerce store, a multilingual site or anything with years of content is a different story. That’s where professional WordPress migration services pay for themselves, because one missed redirect pattern can cost more than the whole project.
The team at Beetweb moves sites from other CMSs, custom platforms and older WordPress setups, with SEO protection built into every step. Redirect mapping, staging tests and post-launch checks come as standard, not as extras. If your current site also needs a health check first, their WordPress audit services are a smart place to start.
