SEO Site Migration Checklist + Redirect Mapping Workbook

Google’s own site move guide lists the usual reasons migrations lose traffic: redirects pointing to the wrong URLs, noindex or robots.txt blocks left over from staging, and sitemaps nobody updated. This free Google Sheets workbook pairs a phase-by-phase migration checklist with a redirect mapping workbook, so the plan and the redirects live in one file. It’s built on Google’s documentation and on the fuzzy matching workflow from my tutorial on 404 and redirect mapping.

Who it’s for

SEOs, developers and project managers running a domain change, an HTTPS move, a URL restructure or a CMS replatform, on sites from a few hundred to tens of thousands of URLs.

How to use it

1. Make your own copy and work through the Checklist tab phase by phase: scope and plan, benchmark, redirect mapping, pre-launch, launch day, first weeks and the first year.
2. Paste every old URL into the Redirect map tab with its clicks and referring domains. The sheet marks high-priority URLs using thresholds you set.
3. Draft matches with fuzzy matching: the Google Sheets template for small sites, or the triple fuzzy matching notebook for larger ones. Paste the suggestions, similarity scores, match types and algorithms into the matching columns.
4. Pick a decision for each URL (accept, override, 410, 404 or no change). The sheet builds the final destination, source path, an Apache rule and warning flags.
5. Crawl the old URLs in list mode before and after launch, record status codes and hops, and move each row through QA until it’s live and verified.

What you get

• 43 checks in seven phases, each with why it matters, how to check it, an evidence label and links to Google’s documentation and MLforSEO tutorials
• A redirect mapping tab with 2,000 prepared rows and columns that match the output of MLforSEO’s fuzzy matching notebooks
• Automatic flags for home page redirects, chains, self-redirects, non-200 destinations and low-scoring matches you accepted
• Launch-day steps for Search Console’s Change of Address tool, Bing Webmaster Tools and IndexNow
• A progress dashboard covering both the checklist and the redirect QA, plus a plain Markdown version on GitHub

Limits and honest caveats

Fuzzy matching measures how similar two strings look and has no sense of meaning or intent, so every partial match still needs a human review. The Apache rules use mod_alias Redirect, which matches by prefix, so check them with your developer or use your platform’s own redirect manager. The sheet doesn’t crawl anything itself: you’ll need a crawler such as Screaming Frog for the benchmark and the redirect tests.

Pair it with the tutorial on 404 and redirect mapping with fuzzy matching, and learn the matching methods in the fuzzy matching module of Introduction to Machine Learning for SEO.