Follow this checklist to migrate your website to a new platform or domain. Brought to you by MangoBlogger.com

This checklist combines core SEO, technical site performance, social sharing, and structured data into a single "master list."

The Ultimate On-Page SEO Checklist

Website migrations are high-stakes operations. If handled correctly, you can actually improve your rankings by cleaning up technical debt; if not, you risk losing years of SEO authority.

Since you're working with environments like Django and Docker, we can use a more "DevOps" approach to this checklist.

Phase 1: Pre-Migration & Staging Management

This is where the migration is won or lost. Your priority is to create a perfect clone for testing while keeping search engines far away.

🛑 How to Manage Your Dev/Staging Environment

To prevent "Duplicate Content" penalties or your dev site outranking your live site, use these three layers of protection:

• Layer 1 (The Social Filter): Add a <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"> tag to your global base template on the dev branch.
• Layer 2 (The Crawler Block): Use a robots.txt file specifically for staging.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Developer Tip: In Docker, you can mount a different robots.txt for your staging container using environment variables. * Layer 3 (The Iron Shield): Use HTTP Basic Authentication (htpasswd). Search engine bots cannot bypass a login popup, making this the most reliable way to keep your dev environment 100% private.

📊 SEO Benchmarking

Before touching a single file, document your current "health":

• Crawl the current site: Use a tool like Screaming Frog to export every single existing URL, Page Title, and H1.
• Record Traffic Benchmarks: Save a report of your top 50 most-trafficked pages from GA4 and GSC. These are your "VIPs"—if these drop, the migration failed.
• Backlink Audit: Use Ahrefs or GSC to see which pages have the most external "link juice." These must have direct 301 redirects.

Phase 2: The Redirect Strategy

The most common mistake is redirecting everything to the homepage. Do not do this. Google treats "all-to-home" redirects as soft 404s, and you will lose ranking power.

• 1:1 Mapping: Create a spreadsheet. Column A is the "Old URL," Column B is the "New URL."
• Match Intent: If /about-us-2023 becomes /about, map it directly.
• Consolidate: If you are deleting three old blog posts to make one "Mega Guide," redirect all three old URLs to the one new guide.
• Keep Metadata: Ensure your Title Tags and Meta Descriptions from the old site are ported over to the new one exactly as they were (unless you are intentionally optimizing them).

Phase 3: Launch Day Execution

When you flip the switch, precision is key.

1. Remove the Blocks: Ensure the noindex tags and robots.txt "Disallow: /" are removed from the production build.
2. Deploy 301s: Activate your redirect rules (via Nginx, .htaccess, or Django middleware).
3. Update GSC: * If the domain name changed, use the Change of Address Tool in Google Search Console.

4. Submit your new Sitemap.xml.

5. Update Internal Links: Do a global search-and-replace in your database to ensure no internal links are pointing to the old URLs (avoiding "redirect chains").

Phase 4: Post-Migration Monitoring

The first 14 days are critical for catching "leaks."