Website
Five checks that show whether a website needs to move
Judge by the response a crawler receives, not by what the browser shows. If that response has no body text, if the URL structure has no pattern that lets pages scale, or if the sitemap can’t keep up with new pages, more writing won’t build up. If two of those three apply, moving the site comes first.
- 01What to check before deciding to move
- 02What breaks when you move
- 03What you have after the move
- 04What moving doesn’t change
Checks
What to check before deciding to move
All five can be checked in a browser without any tools. If two or more fail, moving the website comes before publishing more content.
- 01
Body text in the HTML source
Is the body text in the HTML the server sends?
Open the page, view the source (Ctrl+U), and search it for the first sentence you see on screen. If the sentence is on screen but not in the source, the check fails.
If it fails Search engines and generative systems read the HTML the server sends. If there’s no body text in it, they see an empty page, and writing more changes nothing.
- 02
URL structure
Can the URL structure scale to more pages?
Look at the pattern your current URLs follow. If every page has an arbitrary name, or pages are told apart by query parameters (the numbers after a question mark), there’s no pattern.
If it fails Every new page needs someone to name its URL by hand. Expanding to hundreds of pages in step 2 is hard to make work on a site like that.
- 03
sitemap.xml and robots.txt
Does the sitemap pick up new pages?
Add /sitemap.xml and /robots.txt after your domain and open them. Count the URLs in the sitemap and compare that with the actual number of pages.
If it fails A hand-maintained sitemap drifts every time pages are added. An out-of-date sitemap points crawlers to pages that don’t exist and leaves out pages that do.
- 04
Canonical URL
Does the same page open at several URLs?
Try the URL with and without www, and with and without a trailing slash. If all four versions open on their own, one page has been split into four.
If it fails Accumulated signals get split four ways. The search engine picks which URL to treat as canonical on its own, and that choice is out of your hands.
- 05
HTTP status codes
Does a missing page report that it’s missing?
Add random characters to the end of a URL and open it. If a “not found” screen appears but the HTTP status code is 200 (a soft 404), the check fails.
If it fails Empty pages are treated as normal pages and mix into what gets indexed. The more pages you add, the more empty pages come with them.
Checks 01 and 02 share a root. On websites built page by page by hand, body text is rendered later by scripts, and URLs are assigned case by case. What we fix during a migration starts with those two.
Moving
What breaks when you move
Some things do break. Writing down what breaks and how each one is handled before the move is better than explaining it afterward.
| Item | When you move | How it’s handled |
|---|---|---|
| URLs | Links break at changed URLs | Build a redirect map that pairs each old URL with its new URL first, then set the old URLs to 301-redirect to the new ones. |
| Body content | Carries over as is | Before moving, list the pages that actually appeared in search, so no page that was getting impressions drops out of the new sitemap. |
| External backlinks | Keep pointing to the old URLs | The redirect map passes those links on to the new URLs. Links on other sites are outside our control, so redirects catch them. |
| Webmaster tools | Ownership must be verified again | On the day of the move, re-verify ownership in Google Search Console and Naver Search Advisor (Naver’s webmaster tool) and resubmit the sitemap the same day. |
| Indexing | Re-indexing takes time | Record the date of the move. Without it, there’s no way to interpret what caused later changes in impressions. |
Deliverables
What you have after the move
Beyond a refreshed design, these are deliverables the next person in charge can verify.
Comparison table
Before-and-after responses side by side
Request the same URL list before and after the move and record the HTTP status code and whether body text is present, one row per URL. Instead of being told the site improved, you see two columns.
Redirect map
Old URL to new URL
It records how many old URLs are left without a match. If that number isn’t zero, the map says so.
Crawl and indexing setup
Sitemap, robots.txt, structured data
Built in during development so the sitemap grows as pages grow. It’s output of the website itself, not a file bolted on later.
Next step
A structure where data creates pages
Once pages come from data, step 2 becomes possible. That condition is the real output of a migration.
That completes step 1. Expanding pages on this foundation is step 2, and the standard each page is written to is set out in the contract.
Limits
What moving doesn’t change
Moving creates the conditions for being read. Appearing in answers is the next question, and the engine decides that.
New files alone won’t do it
Google writes that new machine-readable files or markup are not needed to appear in its generative search features. When five AI systems fetched pages directly, what they actually extracted was visible HTML only. So step 1 looks at whether the text is in the response, not at files.
Source: Google Search Central, “AI features and your website”: “You don’t need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features.”, evidence grade A (primary source checked directly)
After the move, the site needs content that answers questions
Moving a website changes the response crawlers receive. If that response has nothing that answers a question, indexing stays where it was. Not every page gets indexed, so first check whether key pages are missing, then decide whether to add more. The citation path lays out, in order, where things get stuck.
Standard: Google advises not to expect every URL on a site to be indexed and to check whether key pages are indexed · Search Console Help, “Page indexing report”: “Don't expect every URL on your site to be indexed.” (support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7440203)
We build to the standards written here. First, we check where your current website is getting stuck.
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