Site Launch and Migration Link Checklist
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A before-and-after checklist for anyone shipping a redesign, platform move, or domain change, covering the URL inventory, the redirect map, the staging crawl, the sitemap, and the checks that prove the links still work once the switch flips.

[ ] Export a complete list of live URLs from the current site: crawl output, sitemap entries, and every page with traffic in analytics over the last year, merged into one inventory.
[ ] Mark every URL in the inventory as keep, move, or retire, with the new address written next to each one that moves.
[ ] Write the redirect map as one row per old URL pointing straight at its final destination, never at another redirect.
[ ] Decide the status code for each rule: a permanent 301 for moves that will not be undone, a temporary 302 only where the old address will come back.
[ ] Give retired pages with no replacement a deliberate 404 or 410 and a helpful not-found page, not a blanket redirect to the home page.
[ ] Test the redirect rules on a staging copy against the full inventory and confirm that each one resolves in a single hop.
[ ] Crawl the staging site with the same crawler you will use afterward so the before and after reports can be compared line by line.
[ ] Update internal links in navigation, footers, and templates so they point at final URLs instead of relying on redirects.
[ ] Search page content, buttons, and image sources for hard-coded links to the old domain or old paths.
[ ] Check canonical tags, hreflang tags, and pagination links on the staging site for old addresses.
[ ] Regenerate the XML sitemap with only final URLs, then confirm every URL in it returns a 200.
[ ] Confirm the staging robots.txt and any noindex tags will not carry a blanket block into production.
[ ] Keep a copy of the old site's crawl, sitemap, and top pages report so there is a baseline to compare against.
[ ] Schedule the switch for a low-traffic window with the developer available to roll back or patch redirect rules.
[ ] Within an hour of going live, spot-check by hand the home page, top landing pages, contact and conversion pages, and a sample of redirects.
[ ] Run a full crawl of the live site the same day and compare the broken, redirecting, and error counts against the staging baseline.
[ ] Request every URL from the old inventory and confirm it lands on the mapped destination with a single hop and the intended status code.
[ ] Watch the 404 report in analytics and the server logs daily for the first two weeks, and add redirect rules for any old URL that keeps getting hit.
[ ] Resubmit the sitemap in the search console tools you use and check the crawl error reports again after a few days.
[ ] Update the external references you control: social profiles, email signatures, ad landing pages, directory listings, and partner links.
[ ] Put a follow-up audit on the calendar for a month after launch to catch chains created by post-launch patches.
[ ] Record which redirect rules exist and why in one shared document so the next migration does not start from scratch.