Guide
How to verify a site migration happened correctly.
A site move is like a house move: the new place is only good if everything actually arrives. This is the inventory list - the four things that have to be true before you switch the old site off.
What "verified" actually means
A migration is not verified because the new site loads, looks right, and the client is happy. It is verified when four specific things are true. Anything short of that is a guess, and the failure shows up weeks later as dropping traffic or a form that stopped sending.
The four checks, in the order that matters:
- Old addresses resolve. Every URL the old site had returns a relevant page, not a 404.
- Search signals survived. Titles, meta descriptions, canonicals, Open Graph tags and structured data made it across.
- Content is complete. Text, headings, links and images are all present.
- The site works. Links resolve, forms submit, menus open, anchors scroll.
The order matters because the first check is the one that costs traffic instantly, and the second is the one that costs traffic slowly. The third and fourth are what your visitors notice.
1. Every old address should still resolve
Before the move, export the old site's sitemap. That list is your inventory. After the move, request each URL and confirm it returns a page rather than an error.
A redirect is fine. A relevant page is fine. A 404 is not, because every one of those URLs may be linked from somewhere: bookmarks, email newsletters, social profiles, review sites, and the search index itself.
What people get wrong here
Redirecting only the pages that got traffic. The pages that never got traffic are the ones with inbound links you have forgotten about, and search engines treat a site-wide set of new 404s as a quality problem.
2. The search signals are the ones that disappear silently
This is the check that matters most and gets skipped most. None of these are visible while you build a page, so a rebuild can look perfect and have lost all of them:
- Meta descriptions. The summary shown under your title in search results.
- Canonical URLs. Tells search engines which address is the real one.
- Open Graph tags. What your page looks like when someone shares it.
- Structured data. The machine-readable description that earns rich results.
- Heading structure. The h1 to h6 outline that describes the page.
How to check it by hand: open the page on the old site, view the source, and compare against the new one. On a five-page site that is a reasonable afternoon. On a fifty-page site it is the reason this check does not get done.
This is what the free scan on the homepage reports in 20 seconds: the platform your site is on, and which of these a move would put at risk.
3. Content completeness is a listing, not a spot check
Spot-checking five pages tells you those five pages are fine. Completeness means every text block, heading, link and image from the old version is accounted for on the new one - including the pages nobody opens.
Matching by eye fails because a rebuild rearranges rather than deletes. Text gets merged into a different section, an image becomes a background, a heading becomes body copy. The content is technically present and effectively lost.
4. Does it still work?
The failures here are invisible on screen, which is what makes them dangerous:
- A contact form whose submission target still points at the old domain. It looks right and silently drops every enquiry.
- Internal links that still reference old URLs which now redirect or 404.
- A mobile menu that opens on desktop and not on a phone.
- In-page anchors that no longer scroll because the target id changed.
None of these are visible in a screenshot. All of them are found by a click.
When can you switch the old site off?
When all four checks pass on the new site - not before. The old site is your reference: it is what the client already had, and it holds the rankings being moved. Once it is switched off, the comparison is no longer possible and any difference you missed becomes permanent.
If you cannot run the checks yourself, run them against a live staging address while the old site is still up. That is exactly what a two-URL comparison needs: both versions reachable at once.
Doing this automatically
MigrateKit runs all four checks against both sites - the old one live and the new one on staging - and returns a pass/fail scorecard listing what did not come across. It reads rendered pages, so it works when the old site is a Wix or Squarespace account you cannot instrument.
One honest limitation: it checks the public-facing layer. A form that submits correctly is verified; whether the submission lands in the right inbox is something only you can confirm.
See what your move puts at risk.
One address, 20 seconds, no account. Or run the full check against the new site and get a pass/fail scorecard listing exactly what did not come across.