A CMS migration touches every URL, template and internal link on the site at once. Done carelessly it looks like a full-site redesign to search engines - and gets treated like one.
Before you move a single page
- Crawl the current site and export every indexable URL with its traffic and backlinks.
- Decide the URL strategy up front: keep, consolidate, or redirect - with a mapping sheet, not guesses.
- Benchmark Core Web Vitals and structured data so you can prove nothing regressed.
During the build
Rebuild templates with the same heading hierarchy and metadata fields, wire canonical tags and hreflang from the CMS rather than by hand, and keep the redirect map under version control alongside the code.
Launch week
Ship the redirects with the site, submit updated sitemaps, and watch Search Console daily for two weeks. Most losses come from a small number of high-value URLs - catching them in the first days is the difference between a blip and a quarter of recovery.
