Post-Migration SEO Audit: What to Check After a Replatform

Most migration playbooks focus on pre-launch and launch day. The audit that gets skipped is the two-week post-migration check, which is when the issues that survived launch start showing in Google Search Console and the longer-term symptoms emerge. This article is the specific audit to run two weeks after a replatform, in roughly the order it makes sense to run it.

Reconcile expected vs actual indexed pages

By two weeks post-migration, Google should have crawled and indexed most of your priority pages on the new platform. Pull the Coverage report and compare the count of valid indexed URLs to your sitemap. If the gap is larger than expected, the issue is usually either a redirect chain that lost equity, a canonical tag misconfiguration that consolidated pages incorrectly, or a noindex tag that survived from staging.

Check ranking-position deltas for top queries

For your top 20 queries by traffic, compare the current ranking position to the pre-migration baseline. A drop of one or two positions is normal noise. A drop of five or more is a real problem. Look specifically at which page is ranking now versus before — sometimes the migration changed which page Google considers the canonical for a query, and the new page is weaker than the old.

Verify redirect health

Crawl every URL in your redirect map and confirm each lands on its intended destination in a single 301 hop. Redirect chains of three or more hops leak link equity. Soft 404s where redirects land on irrelevant pages are worse — they actively damage rankings.

Check for orphaned high-value content

A common migration outcome is that some pages remain technically live but lose all internal links because the navigation or content templates changed. These orphans get crawled less often and ranked lower over time. Identify pages with high pre-migration traffic that have zero or very few internal links post-migration, and edit them back into the link graph.

Review schema markup carry-over

Schema is often regenerated from scratch during a migration and can lose precision in the process. Pull the Rich Results test on five examples of each template — product, article, FAQ — and confirm the schema validates and matches the pre-migration schema's coverage.

Audit Core Web Vitals against baseline

If you saved a Lighthouse baseline pre-migration, compare it to the current production scores. A drop of 10 points or more on any Core Web Vital warrants investigation — the new platform might be shipping more JavaScript, larger images, or slower server responses.

Examine internal link distribution

The internal link graph after a migration is rarely identical to before, even if the URLs are. Run a link-graph analysis comparing pre and post. The pages that lost the most internal authority are the ones to re-link first.

External links you may have broken

If your migration changed URL structure, any external links pointing to old URLs depend on your redirect chain. Confirm a sample of externally-linked pages by checking the top backlinks in Search Console and visiting each via the original URL. Any that 404 or soft 404 need redirect fixes immediately.

Track the recovery curve

A successful migration recovers within four to six weeks. Plot weekly traffic against the pre-migration baseline and watch the slope. A steady upward trajectory means the audit is working. A flat line or downward slope means there is an issue the audit has not caught yet.

When to call the migration done

A migration is "done" when traffic, indexed page count, and average ranking position are within 5% of pre-migration values for four consecutive weeks. Below that bar, you are still in recovery and need to keep auditing. Above it, you can return to normal SEO cadence.

A continuous site audit running through the migration window catches issues hours after they surface rather than during the next manual audit. For high-stakes migrations, the marginal cost of having continuous monitoring during the recovery window is genuinely worth it. UtilitySEO supports this workflow out of the box.