The Technical SEO Checklist for a Replatform
Migrations are where organic traffic goes to die. Here is the sequence we follow to protect rankings through a rebuild.
A replatform is the single highest-risk event in the life of an organically successful website. The damage is rarely caused by the new platform; it is caused by the details of the old one that nobody inventoried before switching it off.
Before design starts
- Crawl the existing site in full and export every URL, including paginated and parameterised variants
- Pull twelve months of Search Console data so you know which pages actually earn impressions
- Record current rankings for your priority terms as a baseline you can compare against later
- Inventory existing structured data, canonical tags and hreflang annotations
- Note every page currently earning external links — these are the ones that must not break
During the build
- Produce a one-to-one redirect map; where a page has no direct equivalent, choose the closest relevant page rather than defaulting everything to the homepage
- Preserve title and description patterns for pages that already rank well — a rewrite is a separate experiment, not part of the migration
- Reimplement structured data before launch, not after
- Keep the staging environment blocked from indexing, and verify that the block is removed at cutover
- Confirm that content rendered client-side is visible to a crawler that does not execute your JavaScript the way you expect
At launch
- Submit the new sitemap immediately and keep the old URL inventory to hand
- Spot-check redirects across every URL pattern, not just the top pages
- Verify robots.txt on the production domain as the very first check after DNS propagates
- Watch server logs for crawler 404s during the first week
For thirty days afterwards
Index coverage, crawl stats and rankings need daily attention for the first fortnight and weekly attention after that. Some fluctuation is normal while search engines re-evaluate the site. A sustained decline in indexed pages is not, and the earlier it is spotted the cheaper it is to reverse.
The redirect map is not paperwork. On a content-heavy site it is the single most valuable artefact of the entire migration.
The Cherbix Team
Engineering & editorial
Written and reviewed by the Cherbix engineers who do this work day to day — the same people who build the software, run the migrations and wire up the automation described here.