The Moving-Day Checklist: Everything to Do Before You Switch

Every website migration that goes badly goes badly in the same way: somebody did the fun part first. They picked the new template, spent a Saturday making the home page look right, and then discovered on the Tuesday that there was no export, no URL list and no plan for the email.

This checklist puts the boring parts where they belong, which is at the front. Work through it in order. Nothing here takes long individually; the value is entirely in the sequence.

Four weeks out: take the inventory

Open a spreadsheet. This one document becomes your redirect map, your rebuild list and your final test plan, so it is worth half an hour of real attention.

• Every page URL on the site, including ones not linked from the navigation.
• Every blog post URL, with its publication date and author.
• Every product URL, with SKU, price, variant list and stock count.
• Every form on the site, and where its submissions currently go.
• Every integration: analytics, pixels, chat widgets, booking tools, payment providers.
• Every DNS record on the domain, copied verbatim, with particular attention to MX and TXT entries.
• Every subscription attached to the domain — site plan, domain registration, business email, any add-on. They renew separately and they cancel separately.

The fastest way to the URL list is your own sitemap, usually at /sitemap.xml. Read it, paste the paths into the sheet, then walk your navigation to catch the pages the sitemap missed.

Four weeks out: find out whether an export exists

Before you plan anything, establish what the platform you are leaving will actually hand over. This single answer determines whether the next month is a migration or a rebuild, and platforms differ enormously.

Look for three things specifically: a site or content export file, a products CSV, and a contacts or subscribers CSV. If all three exist you are in good shape. If only the CSVs exist, your pages and posts are being retyped. If none of them exist, everything is being retyped.

The platform-by-platform answer is in the builders with no way out, and the wider order of operations is on the plan for switching website builders.

Three weeks out: export everything that will export

Do this while the account is healthy and the plan is paid. Exports vanish with access.

• The site or content export file, if one exists.
• Products, as CSV.
• Orders, as CSV.
• Contacts and subscribers, as CSV.
• Form submissions, which are usually a separate export from the form builder.
• Images. If there is no bulk media download, right-click your way through the important ones or pull them from your own originals folder.
• A full-page screenshot of every page. This is the unglamorous one and it is the one you will thank yourself for, because it is the only record of what the site looked like once the account is closed.

Put all of it in one dated folder. Back the folder up somewhere that is not the machine you are working on.

Three weeks out: build the redirect map

Two columns: old path, new path. One row per URL from your inventory.

Fill in the new column as you decide the new structure. Pages you are not rebuilding still get a row — point them at the nearest useful parent, never at the home page if anything more specific exists, and never at nothing.

No hour in the project pays back more, and none of it shows until the week you skipped it. Build the redirect map has the procedure end to end.

Two weeks out: build the new site, privately

Start the new platform’s trial. Turn on site password protection or keep it on the platform’s temporary address, so you never have two live versions of your business competing with each other in search results.

Rebuild or import in this order, because each step depends on the one before it.

1. Set the permalink or URL structure first. Changing it later invalidates every row of your map.
2. Create the navigation skeleton — every page as an empty shell, in the right hierarchy.
3. Import or retype the content, page by page, following your inventory.
4. Load the products, then verify ten of them by hand against the old store.
5. Rebuild the forms and send a test submission from each.
6. Reinstall the analytics and any pixels.
7. Paste in the entire redirect map.

Then click through the whole site on a phone. Rebuilt sites break on small screens first.

One week out: prepare the switch

• Lower the TTL on your domain’s A, CNAME and any other records that will change. A day or two at a short TTL means the eventual switch propagates in minutes rather than hours.
• Write out your current MX and TXT records on paper, on a separate sheet from everything else. These are the ones that take your email down if you get them wrong.
• Confirm where the domain is actually registered. It is not always where you think, and it determines who you are logging into on the day.
• If you intend to transfer the registration rather than just point the domain, check whether you are inside a sixty-day lock. ICANN’s lock applies after a recent registration, a recent transfer or a recent change of registrant contact details, and no registrar can override it. If you are locked, point the domain now and transfer later.
• Pick a quiet day. Not a Friday. Not the day before you travel.

The day itself

Work in this order and nothing is ever dark for long.

1. Final content check on the new site, with the password still on.
2. Remove the password. The site is now live on its temporary address.
3. Change the DNS records to point at the new platform.
4. Re-enter the MX and TXT records exactly as you wrote them down.
5. Wait. Check from a phone on mobile data, not the machine you have been working on all week — your own DNS cache will lie to you.
6. Test the full path a customer takes: find a page, submit a form, complete a checkout, receive the email.
7. Send an email to the domain from an outside address and reply to it.

The twelve checks before you cancel anything

Do not cancel the old plan on launch day. Give it two to four weeks. Imports on the new side may still be fetching images from the old site, and if something is badly wrong you want the option of pointing the domain back while you fix it.

Before you close the old account, confirm all twelve of these.

• Twenty old URLs picked at random each land on the right new page, with a 301 rather than a 302 or a 404.
• The home page, the contact page and your best-performing page all load on a device that has never visited the new site.
• Every form submits and the notification arrives in an inbox a human actually reads.
• Email to the domain is being delivered and sent.
• Products match on price, variant, stock and weight.
• A real test order completes, including the confirmation email and a refund.
• Analytics is recording sessions on the new site.
• The sitemap at the new site lists the pages you expect and has been submitted.
• Your 404 report is being watched daily.
• Images are served from your own domain, not from the old platform’s media host.
• You hold local copies of every export, plus the screenshots.
• You have checked whether the domain registration and any business email are on separate subscriptions that need separate handling.

Then, and only then, turn off auto-renewal. Not delete — auto-renewal. The distinction matters, because a deleted account takes the exports with it.

The three mistakes this checklist exists to prevent

Cancelling early. It saves one month’s subscription and can cost you your images, your archive and your ability to retreat.

Treating the domain as step one. It is the only step with a mandatory waiting period and the only one the public sees instantly. It goes last.

Skipping the URL map because the site is small. Small sites have links pointing at them too, and a map of fifteen rows takes ten minutes. The sites that never recover from a move are almost always the ones where nobody wrote the map down.