Use cases

Website Migrations

Run a website migration on crawl evidence: baseline the old URLs, compare status codes and canonicals after the move, then verify every redirect resolves.

Continue with a bounded audit

Use this when

  • You are changing URLs, hosts, or site structure and want to catch what the move breaks before search engines do.

A reviewable workflow

  1. Crawl the current site and keep the result as a pre-migration baseline: which URLs exist, what they return, and how they link to each other.
  2. After the move, crawl again and compare Health Score and crawl history to see which URLs changed status, lost a canonical, or now redirect.
  3. Turn the confirmed breakages into a Fix Pack, apply it, then re-crawl so the redirects and canonicals are verified rather than assumed.

What to inspect

  • Redirect behaviour on moved URLs: the status code, whether it resolves in a single hop, and whether the target returns 200.
  • Canonical and hreflang tags on the new URLs, which commonly survive a migration still pointing at the old structure.
  • Pages whose status changed between the two crawls — new 404s and soft 404s are the usual migration casualties.

Relevant DigestSEO products

Site Audit platform

Fix Pack

Important boundaries

  • A crawl comparison catches structural breakage, not lost relevance; traffic can still fall after a technically clean migration.
  • Clear technical evidence and useful content can support better decisions; they do not guarantee rankings, citations, or inclusion in AI answers.

Related use cases

Technical SEO

Technical SEO you can verify: crawl the site with DigestSEO, rank every fault by severity, fix them, then re-crawl to confirm each one actually cleared.

SEO Monitoring

SEO monitoring for technical SEO tracking: schedule crawls, follow Health Score across crawl history, and see which issues appeared since the previous run.

SEO Guide

Hreflang

The return-link rule, self-referencing annotations, valid language and region codes, and what x-default is actually for.

Questions and answers

When is Website Migrations a good fit?

You are changing URLs, hosts, or site structure and want to catch what the move breaks before search engines do.

What are the boundaries of Website Migrations?

A crawl comparison catches structural breakage, not lost relevance; traffic can still fall after a technically clean migration.

What is the next step after reviewing Website Migrations?

Evidence-led SEO and AEO workflows. Technical foundations and useful content matter; no page promises rankings, citations, or AI-answer inclusion.

Continue with a bounded audit

Clear technical evidence and useful content can support better decisions; they do not guarantee rankings, citations, or inclusion in AI answers.

Continue with a bounded audit