Before the move
Save an inventory of existing URLs and map each useful old address to its closest new equivalent. Include valuable pages from your CMS or analytics inventory that an internal-link crawl might miss. Keep a copy of the previous sitemap for comparison.
Test the new site’s navigation, page responses, canonical URLs and language annotations. Prepare redirects before launch. Keep development access controls separate from the intended production indexing settings.
At launch
- Use direct permanent server redirects from replaced URLs to their relevant new destinations, avoiding chains.
- Update internal links, canonical references and any hreflang annotations to the new addresses.
- Generate a current sitemap containing the new preferred URLs and publish it on the appropriate site.
- Update the Sitemap reference in robots.txt and relevant search engine reporting tools.
- Check that production pages are accessible and do not retain an accidental noindex directive.
After launch
Check a representative set of old URLs, their redirect destinations and new pages. Monitor errors and indexing reports over time; a migration does not finish the moment the new sitemap is uploaded.
Keep redirects available long-term. Where an engine’s migration guidance recommends it, an old-URL sitemap may temporarily help migration discovery and monitoring; it is separate from the current new-URL inventory. Follow the engine’s process for domain changes.
What this tool can check
Run a fresh crawl on the new site and review the resulting addresses for old domains, unwanted variants or missing sections. Compare against your migration inventory. This generator does not configure redirects, compare two crawls automatically or submit change-of-address requests.
Use the error guide for individual failures and the glossary for redirect terminology.
Sources and further reading
Reviewed 2 November 2026. Platform behaviour can change; consult the linked documentation for your setup.