SEO

A redesign rarely damages rankings on purpose — it does it by changing addresses, trimming copy and shipping without a redirect map. This checklist walks the whole migration in sequence: the baseline crawl and ranking snapshot you take before anyone touches the design, the one-row-per-URL redirect table, content and internal-link parity, the technical checks that belong on staging, an hour-by-hour launch-day runbook, and a 30-day monitoring plan that tells you whether a dip is normal or a defect. It closes with the five mistakes that cost the most traffic, the traps that appear when the CMS changes, and the questions teams ask most.