Phase 5: Preserve SEO During the Migration

This phase is the most important one for marketing leaders to make sure they don’t lose what they’ve maintained for years. A poorly handled migration can wipe out years of search rankings in a matter of days, while a well-handled one preserves nearly all of it.

SEO preservation during a migration is a checklist of specific, well-understood technical steps that you need to follow.

Although this is not a different process that is to be handled separately, this has to be in sync with phase 4 of the Migrate Content.

Preserve Existing URL Structures

The biggest factor for protecting your SEO is keeping your URLs the same wherever possible. If a page in Sitecore has the URL services/digital-marketing, keep the same in WordPress instead of changing it to something like yourwebsite.com/digital-marketing-services.

Every URL change will mean you will have to rely on a redirect to carry the link juice. While it is okay at times, it is always best to keep the original URL as much as possible.

Create a Redirect Strategy

For any URL that changes, or any old page you’re dropping, set up a 301 redirect. This tells search engines and browsers “this page has moved here for good.” It also passes most of the old page’s ranking value to the new one.

Build a redirect map to follow:

1. Take the full list of old URLs from Phase 1.
2. Match each one to its new WordPress URL.
3. For pages you removed, redirect to the closest matching page, not just the homepage. Sending everything to the homepage is a common shortcut. But Google sees through it, and it makes for a bad user experience too.
4. Set up the redirects with a plugin like Redirection, or at the server level for bigger sites.

Test every redirect after launch. A broken redirect stays invisible until someone, or Google, hits a 404 where a real page used to be.

Migrate Metadata

You need to carry every page’s meta title and description, the text shown in Google search results, correctly. You already reviewed these in Phase 1. Now it’s time to add them in WordPress, usually with a plugin like Yoast SEO or Rank Math.

Use this migration to fix any titles or descriptions that were outdated, cut off, or missing in the old system.

Rebuild Structured Data

As covered earlier, schema markup, the structured data behind rich results like star ratings, FAQ dropdowns, and event listings, doesn’t transfer automatically. Rebuild it in WordPress, with an SEO plugin or a dedicated schema plugin.

Go through your content types and check that each one has the right schema: article schema for blog posts, product schema for product pages, FAQ schema for FAQs, and so on.

This is also a good opportunity to add a new schema (Service, Event, ContactPage) or enhance existing structured data by adding more properties that may not exist today, such as social profiles, contact details, business address, opening hours, author credentials, product pricing and availability, ratings and reviews, service areas, and service types, among others.

Test everything with Google’s Rich Results Test tool before launch.

Update Internal Links

Every internal link on your site needs to point to the new WordPress URLs, not the old Sitecore ones. Leaving old links in place forces every click through a redirect, which slows load time and slightly weakens link value.

Run a site-wide search and replace to update internal links across your migrated content. Then spot-check your high-traffic pages to make sure they point where they should.

Generate New XML Sitemaps

An XML sitemap tells search engines which pages on your site should be crawled. Generate a fresh one for WordPress. Most SEO plugins do this automatically. Submit it to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools as soon as you go live.

This helps Google find and reindex your new WordPress pages faster.

Review Robots.txt Settings

The robots.txt file tells search engines which parts of your site to crawl or skip. Compare your old Sitecore robots.txt (from Phase 1) with your new WordPress one, and make sure intentional exclusions, like staging areas, admin pages, or duplicate content, carry over correctly, including campaign pages.

Also, make sure WordPress isn’t accidentally blocking search engines entirely. This happens more than you’d think, usually because a “discourage search engines” setting is left on from staging, or a developer forgot to turn it off after development.

Verify Analytics and Tracking

Finally, after all the other SEO elements, confirm your analytics and tracking setup is fully operational before launch, not after. Check that:

• Google Analytics (Matomo or your analytics platform of choice) is correctly installed and tracking pageviews
• Conversion events (form submissions, button clicks, purchases) are firing correctly
• Google Search Console is verified for your domain, so you can monitor indexing and search performance from day one
• Any tag manager setup (Google Tag Manager) has been rebuilt with all the same tags and triggers as your Sitecore site

Losing tracking data for even a few days post-launch means a gap in your reporting that can’t be recovered later.

What You Should Have When This Phase Is Done

By the end of Phase 6, you should have:

• URLs preserved wherever possible, with changes kept to a minimum
• A complete 301 redirect map covering every old URL
• Metadata (titles, descriptions) migrated and reviewed for every page
• Structured data rebuilt and validated with Google’s Rich Results Test
• Internal links updated to point to new WordPress URLs
• A fresh XML sitemap submitted to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools
• Robots.txt reviewed and confirmed not to be blocking search engines
• Analytics and conversion tracking verified as fully functional

SEO preservation is one of the most technical parts of this migration. Every item on this list is something you can test and verify before launch.