Checking a site migration in the first week
Before a migration, audit the old site and run a rank check so there is a baseline. After it, crawl the new site and fix Broken internal link, Redirect chain, Page returns an error, Conflicting canonical and noindex first, then compare a fresh rank check and Search Console with the baseline.
A migration moves URLs, templates or domains in one release, and most of the traffic it loses is lost to a handful of mechanical faults. Every one of them shows up in a crawl within an hour of the release, which makes the first week the cheapest time to find them.
Before the release: take a baseline
- Audit the old site. Run a site audit at the plan’s page limit. Export the issues as CSV and keep the Pages crawled list: it is the inventory of URLs that must still answer, directly or through a redirect, after the move.
- Run a rank check. On each tracker, choose Run check now. The positions it stores are the baseline the post-migration checks are read against.
- Note the Search Console figures. On Search performance, the 28-day clicks, impressions and average position are the traffic baseline.
After the release: crawl first
Crawl the new site the day it goes live. These issues explain most migration losses, in the order to fix them:
| Issue | What it usually means after a migration |
|---|---|
| Page is set to noindex | a staging setting shipped to production |
| Server error, Page returns an error | an old URL with no redirect, or a template that fails |
| Broken internal link | navigation or content still points at old URLs |
| Redirect chain | old URL to interim URL to new URL; point the first hop at the last |
| Conflicting canonical | canonicals still name the old URLs or the staging host |
| Crawler was blocked | a firewall or bot-protection rule from staging answering 401, 403, 429 or 503 |
Then compare the Pages crawled count with the baseline. A new site that
crawls far fewer pages from the same start URL has lost internal links, or its
robots.txt disallows paths the crawler now skips; the Orphan page and
Page links nowhere issues help locate the first.
If the domain itself changed, update it under Project settings. The project keeps its history, so earlier audits and rank checks stay recorded against the old domain. A tracker keeps the domain it was created with, so create a tracker for the new domain and add the same keywords to it.
In the first week: watch ranks and Search Console
- Run a rank check two or three days after the release and again at the end of the week. Movement of a few places is normal while Google recrawls; a keyword that falls to not ranking and stays there points at a URL that was not redirected.
- On Search performance, compare the 7-day window with the 28-day baseline you noted. Impressions recover before clicks do, so falling impressions in the second week are the signal to act on.
What it costs
A crawled page costs 1 credit, so the two audits cost the pages they crawl. A rank check at the default depth costs 40 credits per keyword per device, and Search Console reads cost nothing. The audits count toward the plan’s monthly audits: 60 on Pro.