By Mehdi HassanWhat should you monitor after a website migration?
After a website migration, monitor four things: whether old URLs redirect correctly, whether new pages get indexed, whether search traffic holds on a page-by-page basis, and whether leads and conversions still flow. Each has its own check, and each matters at a different point in the weeks after launch.
Monitoring only works against a baseline. If you followed our website migration SEO checklist, you saved one before launch. If not, rebuild it from Search Console's history now. The schedule below is the one we use, adjusted to the size of the site.
What's on the post-migration SEO monitoring checklist for week one?
Week one is about catching launch mistakes while they're still cheap. Check daily, because a noindex tag or a broken redirect rule can cost a full week of crawling if nobody notices.
- Re-crawl the old URL list on launch day. Every row should return a 301 to a 200 page in one hop.
- Check live HTML of key templates for noindex, canonicals and robots.txt left over from staging.
- Submit the new sitemap in Search Console and remove old ones that list retired URLs.
- Confirm tracking: analytics tag, consent banner behavior, conversion events and form submissions.
- Submit a test lead through every form and confirm it arrives in the CRM.
- Spot-check top pages for title, description, schema and content against your snapshots.
What should you check at weeks two and four?
At weeks two and four, compare page-level Search Console data with the same period before launch and work through any new errors. This is when indexing settles enough for real trends to appear.
Week 2: Indexing report
Open the pages report and look for new not-found, redirect error or crawled-not-indexed entries. Fix any old URL returning a 404 that had clicks or links.
Week 2: Top pages
Compare clicks and impressions on your top pages with the benchmark. Flag any page down sharply, and compare its old and new content.
Week 4: Queries
Check the queries behind your top pages. A page holding impressions but losing clicks usually has a weaker title or snippet.
Week 4: Redirect hits
Review server or host logs, or analytics, for traffic still arriving on old URLs. Update the strongest backlinks and your own links at the source.
Week 4: Speed
Compare Core Web Vitals for key templates with the benchmark. Field data takes a while to accumulate, so treat early numbers as a signal.
If week two shows a real drop, don't wait for week four. Our guide to traffic drops after a website migration gives the diagnosis order, and redirect fixes are covered in our guides to Webflow 301 redirects, Framer redirects and redirects in Next.js.
What should you check at weeks eight and twelve?
At weeks eight and twelve, confirm the migration has settled: rankings and clicks are back near the benchmark, conversions match, and the error reports are quiet. Anything still down by now needs a fix, not more waiting.
Week | Main question | Checks | Action if it fails |
|---|---|---|---|
1 | Did anything break at launch? | Redirects, indexing, tracking, forms | Fix the same day |
2 | Is Google picking up the new URLs? | Pages report, top pages | Fix 404s, compare content |
4 | Are trends forming? | Queries, CTR, redirect hits, speed | Rewrite weak titles, update links |
8 | Have top pages recovered? | Page clicks vs benchmark, conversions | Restore content, internal links |
12 | Is the migration done? | Full crawl, long-tail errors, schema | Close out or start a recovery sprint |
At week twelve, run a full crawl of the new site and compare it with the pre-launch crawl. Look for orphan pages, duplicate titles and chains that crept in during post-launch edits. If several issues remain, our 30-day website migration recovery plan is the next step.
How do you monitor redirects after migration?
Monitor redirects by re-crawling the full old URL list on a schedule and by watching for 404s in Search Console. Redirects break after launch more often than people expect, usually when someone renames a page or edits the rules.
Keep the old URL list as a saved crawl project, run it at each checkpoint, and diff the results. Treat any new 404 or new chain as a bug. Our 301 redirect map template includes a status column for exactly this, so the sheet stays the single record of what should happen to every old URL.
Hypothetical example: what a week-four check catches
For example, suppose a team launches a new Webflow site and everything passes in week one. By week four, Search Console shows a cluster of new not-found URLs under /resources. It turns out a marketer renamed the resources collection's slug after launch, so every post moved and the original redirects now point to dead paths.
The team adds one folder-level redirect, updates the old rules to point at the final URLs so there are no chains, and adds a note to the site docs that collection slugs shouldn't change without a redirect. Without the scheduled check, the problem would have surfaced months later as a slow traffic decline.
When can you stop post-migration monitoring?
You can stop dedicated post-migration monitoring when page-level clicks, indexing and conversions have held near the benchmark for several weeks in a row, which on our schedule means about twelve weeks. After that, fold the checks into normal monthly reporting.
Two checks should stay forever: redirects for old URLs and the pages report in Search Console. They catch problems caused by future edits, not by the migration. For a broader ongoing review, our SEO audit checklist covers what to look at each quarter, and our guide on what to include in a migration proposal explains how to make sure monitoring is part of the scope next time.
