How to audit your website before a domain migration
Moving a website to a new domain is risky. Learn how to use a pre-migration audit to protect your SEO and user experience.
How to audit your website before a domain migration
Moving a website to a new domain is one of the riskiest operations in web development. Done correctly, it's a seamless transition; done poorly, it can lead to a catastrophic loss of SEO rankings, broken user experiences, and weeks of manual cleanup.
The secret to a successful move isn't just in the redirects—it's in the audit you perform before you ever touch the DNS.
1. Establish Your Baseline
Before you move, you need a ground-truth record of what currently exists. A full crawl of your site (up to 2000 URLs with Website Toolkit) identifies:
- Every internal link and where it points.
- Every external link that might need updating.
- Missing meta tags or descriptions that should be fixed before they are indexed on the new domain.
2. Map Your Redirects
A migration isn't just about moving files; it's about moving traffic. You need a 1:1 map of where every old URL should go.
- The Homepage Trap: Don't just redirect everything to the new homepage. Users (and search engines) expect to land on the specific content they were looking for.
- Identify 404s: Find existing broken links now so you don't migrate "brokenness" to your new home.
3. The Staging Check
If you are rebuilding as you migrate, run an audit on your staging environment. Website Toolkit supports HTTP Basic Auth, allowing you to crawl protected staging sites to find issues before they ever hit the public internet.
4. Post-Migration Verification
Once the move is live, re-run your crawl on the new domain. Use our Migration Project module to automatically verify that every old URL is returning a status and landing on the correct destination.
Summary
A domain migration is only as good as the data behind it. By auditing first, you turn a stressful "flip of the switch" into a controlled, verifiable process.