Lab Equipment Website Migration Checklist

Before you start

Export a full crawl of the current site, including product pages, category pages, PDF documents and images. Export traffic and ranking data from Search Console and analytics, and mark the pages that bring visits and quote requests.

Agree who owns product data during the project, and freeze major content changes on the old site where possible.

Map every important URL

Create a spreadsheet of old URLs and their new equivalents. Keep URLs the same where the new structure allows. For everything else, plan a one-to-one 301 redirect, including PDFs that other sites link to.

Avoid redirecting everything to the homepage. Search engines treat that as a lost page.

Migrate data, not just pages

Move products with all attributes, variants, images and linked documents. Run spot checks on every product family, and keep a validation report of what was imported, skipped or changed.

Carry over what search engines read

Migrate titles, meta descriptions, headings, image alt text and structured data. Keep the staging site blocked from indexing, and remove that block at launch.

Launch day

Switch DNS in a quiet window, upload redirects, submit the new XML sitemap in Search Console, and test forms, quote lists, checkout and any integrations with real test orders.

The first four weeks

Check crawl errors, redirect hits and indexing daily at first, then weekly. Compare traffic to key pages against your benchmark, and fix problems while they are small.