Website Migration Checklist: Move Your Site Without Losing Sleep

According to recent data, many site migrations trigger traffic drops, ranking losses, or extended downtime. This checklist helps you avoid those risks by giving you a combined project-management and technical roadmap.

Introduction

A website migration is simply moving your website to a new location (environment). You may have the same domain or a new one, you may still use the same Content Management System (CMS) or a completely new one. Or you may be transitioning from shared hosting to a Virtual Private Server (VPS) or another option. 

Regardless of which version you are using, the fundamental problem stays the same: everything needs to function perfectly once the transition occurs.

It’s easy to find this process stressful because a migration affects every single aspect of your website. 

• Your search engine optimization (SEO) relies upon accurate redirects. 
• Your uptime relies upon proper DNS settings. 
• Your user experience relies upon the speed and stability of your website. 
• Your email configuration relies upon many small details that can easily be overlooked.

This guide helps you create a clear plan for a website migration, rather than simply hoping everything works out smoothly. It also shows you how to complete the website migration steps in a clear and structured way, including both the project management side of things and the technical elements necessary to protect your performance including backup, staging, DNS modifications and mapping of redirects.

Key Takeaways 

• A successful migration requires careful and thorough pre-planning and a smooth execution of all technical aspects.
  
• You can’t skip pre-migration preparations ( stakeholders, metrics, and your service provider).
  
• You can’t skip the technical work involved in backing up data, mapping URLs, creating a staging environment and updating DNS.
  
• The way you coordinate and monitor on launch day will determine if your migration was a success.
  
• To protect your traffic and maintain your search engine rankings, after the data has been transferred, you should have a post-transfer review and continue to monitor your site.
  
• Using UltaHost’s free migration service will significantly lower your risk and operational burden.

“A website migration is as much about people and process as it is about files and DNS. Get both wrong and you undo months of growth.” – Digital Migration Consultant

1. Planning & Preparation

The planning phase is probably the area that most people underestimate in terms of how long it will take, and the biggest area that can easily cause plenty of stress during the migration process.

Identify your migration style

Before spending too much time on the technical aspects of the migration, determine which type of migration you are conducting. Are you migrating to a new web hosting company? Changing your domain name? Switching to a new Content Management System (CMS), such as WordPress? Or simply upgrading your hosting from a Shared Hosting Plan to a Virtual Private Server (VPS)? 

Different types of migrations have different levels of difficulty and require different amounts of time. For example, a simple hosting transfer may only take a few hours, while a complete rebuild of your CMS could take weeks.

If you feel that your current hosting environment is running slowly or experiencing reliability problems, now is a good opportunity to upgrade to a more reliable environment. Most smaller websites run well on a Shared Hosting environment, but if your site runs on WordPress, this is also the ideal time to upgrade to WordPress-optimized hosting with a provider like UltaHost, where you get faster load times, stronger security and a hosting setup that removes most of the technical headaches during a migration.

This is also the stage where many site owners will want to choose the right VPS, especially if they want better performance, isolation and long-term stability during and after the migration.

Define clear roles and responsibilities

Clear expectations are beneficial regardless of whether you are performing the entire migration by yourself or working with a team. Consider defining each task in a quick checklist format as to who is responsible for each one. 

Team members should have clear responsibilities. For example, one member of the team will handle the approvals and timelines, one will be responsible for the backups and DNS, another will review the SEO and performance post-migration, and the hosting provider will be available for support.

Document your current site’s metrics

Document all of your current site’s traffic, rankings, page speed, uptime, and conversion rates. All of these numbers will serve as a baseline for comparison once your site is migrated.

Schedule your migration based on your traffic

Timing can definitely play a role in the success of your migration. Schedule your migration at times when your traffic typically dips. Late evening or weekend migrations usually work best.

Once you have scheduled the migration date, stop updating your content at least 24 hours prior to the migration so that your database remains clean and consistent.

Develop a communication strategy

You don’t have to create a full project package, just develop a basic communication plan that addresses the basics:

• When the migration begins
• What everyone should test after the migration
• How many issues that arise should be reported
• What the fallback plan is

Everyone involved will understand the overall process and the migration will go smoother.

Quick Takeaway: Good planning prevents most migration problems. When everyone understands the scope, their role and the timeline, the technical work becomes safer and far easier to manage. This is where a clear hosting migration checklist becomes incredibly useful for keeping everything organised.

2. Pre-Migration Technical Tasks

This is when the behind-the-scenes preparation will begin. The goal of these steps is to minimize the chance of downtime or broken pages, which will then create a smoother transition into Launch Day. This is also where many teams use a structured website host transfer checklist to make sure nothing important is missed.

Backup your site completely

Take a full backup including your entire database, media, plugins, theme, and all of your configuration settings. Think of this as your safety net. In the event something goes wrong with your transfer, you’ll be able to recover your site in minutes.

While many hosting companies provide automatic backups, take some time and create a clean manual backup prior to migrating your site.

Set up a staging area

Having a staging area (site) provides you with a safe, private place to test your site’s functionality, layout, forms, media path, scripts, and plugin behavior. Try to replicate your future environment as closely as possible within your staging area. By having a staging area, you can identify potential problems early on, particularly if you are switching from an older version of PHP or have changed server configurations.

Crawling your site now

Run a crawl of your site now to determine your full URL structure. This will give you a good understanding of the different types of pages that exist on your site, how they relate to each other, and the metadata associated with those pages. Without doing this crawl first, you will likely lose visibility into your internal link structures during your site’s migration.

Building Your Redirect Map

Your redirects will help ensure the integrity of your SEO rankings and assist in directing your visitors to the correct pages. Although most of your existing URLs will remain unchanged, there will likely be some that will require URL redirection, or in the case of a merge, URL consolidation.

In building your redirect map, you simply want to have a list that confirms:

• Which of your old URLs point to new URLs
• Which pages are being consolidated or removed
• Which high-value pages you want to focus on during your testing process
  

This is a tedious process, but it will save you hours upon hours of ranking problems down the line.

Validate your new hosting environment

Prior to your launch date, you want to confirm that your new hosting plan meets the requirements for your site. This includes ensuring that your hosting account has access to fast NVMe SSD storage, reliable uptime, the proper versions of PHP and MySQL, and sufficient resources to meet your site’s traffic demands. Depending on how quickly your site is growing, it may be beneficial to upgrade to a VPS at this time, providing you more control and power.

Validate DNS and Email Settings

DNS changes can inadvertently cause disruptions to your emails if you do not properly align your email configuration settings. Prior to making your DNS changes, double-check that your MX records, SPF, DKIM, CDN configuration, and nameservers are all ready to switch over without causing any disruption to your email inbox.

Freeze content updates

The final step is to temporarily suspend all content updates to your live site. Any updates made to your live site during your migration process may result in loss or overwrite of previously created content. A temporary freeze of all content updates will ensure consistency and cleanliness across your site.

Before Migration Checklist (Quick Check)✓ Created Full Backup✓ Set up Staging Site✓ Exported Full Crawl✓ Drafted Redirect Map✓ Confirmed Hosting Specs (NVMe SSD, CPU/RAM, PHP/MySQL)✓ Verified DNS, MX, & CDN Settings✓ Activated Content Freeze

If you are planning on migrating your website to UltaHost, we will handle all aspects of backing up your website, setting up a staging environment, and migrating your website for you as part of the service, therefore reducing the amount of stress during this technical phase.

3. Execution on launch day

Launch Day is so much easier when you have a sense of what will happen and in what order. Launch Day is like a timeline (a simple one) instead of a “big switch” and a lot of stress.

Here’s a step-by-step of how things should happen and when.

Final Check T-2 hours:

• Confirm your Content Freeze is still in place.
• Backup all data once again (even if you have additional backups).
• Send a reminder to those who will be impacted during the migration window that edits or other changes cannot be made while it is open.
• Double-check your DNS settings to ensure the switch is done as smoothly as possible.

Switch On T0:

This is the official start of the migration process.

All of your media, files, folders and your full database will be migrated into the new hosting platform. If you use UltaHost’s free migration service, we will handle this part of the process for you.

Update your DNS or nameserver(s) once the files are ready and transferred to the new server. It usually takes less than a few minutes for propagation to take effect although, for a very brief period of time, some users may still visit the older version of your website. This is completely normal.

Early Testing & Quick Fixes T+2 Hours:

Begin testing the sections of your website that are most important:

• Forms and Contact Pages
• Account & Login Pages
• Checkout/Booking Systems
• Search Functionality
• Filtering Capability
• Media Files
• Navigation/Links Between Internal Pages
• Mobile Responsiveness
• Activate any Redirect Maps you created.
• Verify Canonical Tags are pointing to the Preferred URL.

Quickly resolve any minor bugs. Most of the early problems come from scripts, plugins, incorrect paths, etc., and can be resolved quickly.

SEO Tasks & Performance Checks T+4 Hours:

Your SSL Certificate should be activated automatically.

Verify that your website loads over https and that any http pages forward to the https versions. Next, complete your SEO and Performance Tasks:

• Submit your new Sitemap in Google Search Console
• Verify your Robots.txt File
• Verify your 404 Log for Missing Pages
• Verify Server Error Logs for New Warnings
• Verify Your Site Speed
• Complete a full User Journey to verify all aspects feel fluid and responsive.

Now would also be a great time to review Mobile Behavior across multiple screen sizes.

Quick Takeaway:Launch day works best when handled in order: final checks, the DNS switch, then thorough testing. The calmer and more structured the process, the fewer surprises you’ll have afterward.

4. The Period After Migration – Performance Tracking

People often let down their guard and relax too quickly after they’ve completed a migration; however, the hours and weeks right after a migration are equally important to the migration itself. Search engines need some time to recognize the change, and sometimes smaller problems can come to light gradually.

New Benchmark vs. New Metric Comparison

Look at your old benchmarks again. Traffic may bounce around in the short term, but overall, you are looking for long-term patterns and trends.

Watch:

• Overall traffic
• Keyword ranking changes
• The time it takes for each page to load
• The paths users take to convert
• How do different pages behave compared to how they behaved prior to migration

If keyword rankings plummeted or if one of your pages is significantly slower than it was before, troubleshoot immediately.

You can create a simple table as follows to check for anomalies in the first week:

Metric	Target	Actual
Page Load Time	Under 2 seconds	___
Indexed Pages	Matches pre-migration	___
Organic Traffic	Stable or rising	___
404 Errors	Zero or minimal	___
Core Web Vitals	Passing	___

This gives you a quick way to spot anything unusual.

You can also use this stage to refine your understanding of how to migrate a website more efficiently next time, since the real insights often appear once the new version has been live for a few days.

Run an updated full-site crawl

An entire-site crawl is the simplest method to find any problems you may have overlooked. Look for:

• Broken internal links
• Redirect loops or redirects
• Missing images
• Orphan pages (pages with no internal links)
• Failed metadata transfer
• Unplanned URL changes

You should run a complete site crawl after launch if you did not do so prior to launch. This type of crawl can sometimes expose issues that will never appear in a tool/dashboards.

Monitor your Google Search Console

Search Console is the best indicator of how Google views your website. Check for:

• Number of pages indexed
• Coverage exclusions/warnings
• Sudden spikes or click drops
• Manual action updates
• Status of sitemap submissions
• Mobile usability report

Catch anomalies quickly so you can correct them before they affect your search rankings.

Test the Site Performance

Even if your website loads faster than before, check your performance metrics after migrating to monitor how well everything works for at least a few weeks.

You should test:

• Your page speeds on each of your major landing pages
• The core web vitals (LCP, CLS, FID/INP)
• How often your site goes down, and for how long it’s been unstable
• The path through which the user navigates when using a mobile device

If you’re hosting with UltaHost, we provide a guarantee regarding the uptime of your site; however, you may want to still keep a close eye on your metrics.

Get Real-World User Input

Only in real-world usage do some problems show up. Ask colleagues, customers, and other users who are trustworthy to:

• Test filling out forms
• Test logging in and accessing the customer portal
• Test going through the checkout or booking process
• View your site from various types of devices

Often, a user will recognize a problem before a testing tool does.

Improve Your Website After It Has Stabilized

After you have confirmed that your site is running stably, you should utilize this time to make improvements to your website:

• Clean-up or update older content
• Delete old pages that no longer add value
• Improve the UX of the most critical journeys of your users
• Correct layout or spacing problems on mobile
• Continue to speed up any slower pages

Since migration provides you with a rare opportunity to have your site organized and cleaned up, use this time to optimize your site.

UltaHost Simplifies Website Migration

If you’d rather bypass the technical aspects of the migration process entirely, UltaHost offers a free website migration service that will handle all aspects of your migration for you. Our team will perform all necessary file transfers, DNS changes, redirect mapping, and set up for you. For many business owners, this alone eliminates the greatest concerns of the migration process.

In addition to providing a free migration service, UltaHost offers NVMe SSD storage, a 99.9% uptime guarantee, daily backups, built-in DDoS protection and 24/7 human support. Rather than spend days dealing with the technical aspects of your migration, you can simply use that time for your business while a professional handles the bulk of the work for you.

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