B2B SaaS Website Migration Checklist

Before you start, use Google Analytics and Search Console to identify the top-performing pages on your startup website. These are likely to be the Home page, the About us page and some additional pages from the top-level navigation. It may also include some blogs that have secured good rankings for some high-traffic keywords. It is best to ensure that changes to these pages are managed very carefully, especially the URL, meta title, meta descriptions, and H1s. It is also worth checking to assess the number of internal links to these pages to ensure you are not undermining historic efforts by negatively impacting these pages if for example, you are purging legacy pages as part of the process.

Recommended Tools: Google Analytics and Google Search Console

Use Screaming Frog to crawl your site. They offer a free version or a paid version (circa €185 per year). 

With Screaming Frog you can get an idea of your site's existing structure, pages, and assets. You'll have a better view of what pages existed before, what redirects are in place, and what the metadata currently looks like. Doing so could later prove invaluable, should there be any optimization issues on the new site.

Save important information such as:

• Meta titles

• Meta descriptions

• H1–H6 headings

• Server status

• Canonical tags

• Noindex/nofollow pages

Recommended Tool: Screaming Frog

Once the launch of the new website is getting close, take note of the legacy site’s page loading times (key pages - home, product, pricing and About us) and top keyword rankings across desktop and mobile, so you can compare performance post-migration. If you are mostly focused on a US audience make sure to test speed on US servers rather than UK ones to ensure your primary target audience is getting a fast experience. You are primarily looking for scores under 2 seconds. This will be a benchmark you will look to improve on with the new site.

Recommended Tools: Pingdom (Solarwinds) or GTmetrix, and Google PageSpeed Insights 

Save a copy of the old site’s robots.txt and XML sitemaps in case you need these later. The sitemap.xml file is a document in the Extensible Markup Language (XML) format where all of the URLs of your website that you want to get indexed are listed and its primary function is to help search engine robots find and index your website's pages faster. You can use it in Google Search Console to index the site.

The robots.txt file, is a text file that tells search engine robots which pages on your site should and shouldn't be crawled. For example, pages with duplicate content e.g. landing pages, pages or files intended for internal use, etc. shouldn't be crawled. It is also known as the robots exclusion protocol.

Once the new site is live you need to run a 404 check to identify any broken links that occurred as part of the migration. These can then be quickly fixed as part of the process and in advance of a new Google crawl.

Recommended Tool: Broken Link Checker

When migrating a site it is best to reindex the site a few days after the migration once all 404’s have been fixed. You may need to make some additional changes if you are switching domains (see Google Search Console’s change of address functionality).

If you are not using a tool like SEMRush or aHREF’s you may also want to map keyword rankings before the site migration so you can identify top pages that need to be retained. It can also be used for setting up 301 redirects.

Reindex the site using Google Search Console when it goes live so that there is a fresh crawl. You may have updated meta titles and descriptions or fixed broken URLs so again these would need to be recrawled.

Recommended Tool: Google Search Console

It is also important to add an annotation in GA4 as to a new site launch date so that in the years to come any successors in the marketing function have some context as to any inflection points or reasons for major changes in traffic volumes. As most site migrations are designed in part to improve performance it will be important to compare and contrast top KPI’s like Conversion Rates once the migration has bedded down.

Recommended Tool: Google Analytics

Finally, you can run an audit using a popular SEO tool like SEMRush/aHRefs/ Uber Suggest which will expose any major issues that you can fix as part of the clean-up process. You will also want to test all forms on the site to ensure they are firing correctly, and to ensure Google Tag Manager (which will house your Universal Analytics and GA4 code) is also set up and working.

Recommended Tools: SEMRush/aHRefs/ Uber Suggest

Finally, if you want a more detailed analysis / more exhaustive list of elements to consider the following guide is highly recommended.

The Website Migration Guide: SEO Strategy, Process, & Checklist