Website Migration SEO Checklist: Move to Framer, Keep Rankings

This is the SEO checklist and the results. If you want the platform-by-platform walkthrough, read our step-by-step Framer migration guide or the WordPress to Framer guide. This post covers what protects your rankings, how long it takes, what it costs and what happened when we did it for real clients.

Results at a glance

Who this guide is for

You run marketing, brand or growth at a funded company, or you are a founder who owns the website. The site was built for an earlier version of the company. A raise, launch, press moment or ad spend is about to send people to it, and you cannot afford to lose the search traffic it already earns. You also want your team to edit pages without waiting on a developer.

Why rankings drop in a website migration

Rankings fall when URLs change without redirects, when titles, descriptions and headings are lost in the move, when structured data is dropped, or when pages are left out of the new site. Each of these is preventable before launch.

The common thread is that SEO gets treated as a post-launch check. By the time someone notices the drop, Google has already crawled a site full of missing pages. Treat it as a build constraint instead: nothing goes live until every URL that earns traffic has a home or a redirect.

The five steps

1. Audit before you design. Crawl the current site and record every URL, its traffic, its rankings and its metadata. This decides what must move, what can be merged and what can be retired.

2. Map every URL. Keep URLs the same wherever possible. Where they have to change, write a redirect for each one before launch.

3. Rebuild technical SEO in Framer. Titles, descriptions, headings, canonical tags, sitemap and structured data all need rebuilding, not just the visible content.

4. Move the content. Migrate every article, customer story and landing page that earns traffic. Waste Logics' WEEE recycling guide moved from the old blog to a new resources hub and stayed on page one.

5. Launch, then watch for 30 days. Compare clicks, rankings and indexed pages against the baseline from step one. Fix anything that slips in the first weeks.

Website migration SEO checklist

Use this as the sign-off list. If an item is not ticked, the site does not go live.

Before launch

• Full crawl of the old site saved as your baseline: URLs, titles, descriptions, headings, traffic and rankings.

• A redirect map with one row per old URL, pointing to the closest matching new page.

• Every page that earns traffic or links rebuilt on the new site, not just the main pages.

• Titles and meta descriptions carried over or improved, page by page and CMS item by CMS item.

• Canonical tags, structured data and image alt text rebuilt.

• Internal links updated to the new URLs, so you are not relying on redirects inside your own site.

Launch day

• Redirects live and tested against the full list of old URLs.

• New sitemap submitted in Google Search Console.

• Analytics, forms and CRM wiring checked on the live domain.

The 30 days after launch

• Clicks, rankings and indexed pages compared against the baseline each week.

• Crawl errors and pages Google cannot reach fixed as they appear.

• Any page that slips checked first for a missing redirect, lost metadata or thinner content.

What Framer handles, and what you still have to do

Framer lets you set a title and meta description for every page and every CMS item, add redirects in site settings and publish a sitemap automatically. That covers the mechanics. What it does not do is decide which URLs matter, write the redirect map or carry over structured data, which has to be added on purpose. Those decisions are where migrations go wrong, and they are the part we treat as the main workstream.

How to keep backlinks working after a migration

Links from other sites point at your old URLs. If those URLs return a 404, the value of those links is lost. Redirect every old URL that has backlinks to the closest matching new page, not to the homepage. If a page is being retired, send it to the page that now answers the same question.

Should you redesign and migrate at the same time?

You can, and most of our clients do. The rule is to change the design freely but treat URLs and ranking content carefully. Waste Logics got a new design, new pages by industry and role, and regional versions for Australia and New Zealand in the same project, and still lost no rankings, because every ranking page had a planned destination before design work started.

How long does a migration to Framer take?

Page count, how much content earns traffic and how quickly feedback comes back set where in that range you land.

How long does SEO take to settle after a migration?

With a full redirect map and metadata carried over, you should not see a lasting drop. We monitor for 30 days after launch and fix anything that slips in that window. At Waste Logics, search clicks held steady through the switch, and five weeks after launch organic search sessions were up 44%.

What does an SEO-safe migration cost?

Our Migration package starts from $10,000 and takes about five weeks, followed by 30 days of monitoring. The redirect map that protects your rankings is part of the package, not an add-on. The price is fixed before work starts, paid half up front and half at launch, and you own everything. Every package is on the pricing page.

Waste Logics: WordPress to Framer, with AI search visits doubling

Waste Logics builds cloud software for waste and recycling businesses, and its website was its main source of new leads. The old WordPress site made a powerful product look cartoonish, spoke to six industries at once and could not be edited by the marketing team.

We ran the migration as its own workstream: a full crawl, URL mapping and redirects, technical SEO rebuilt in Framer, and every article and customer story moved across. We built pages by industry, role and operational need, regional versions for Australia and New Zealand, and a reusable CMS and component library for campaign pages.

Search clicks held steady through the switch. Five weeks after launch, organic search sessions were up 44% and visits from AI tools such as ChatGPT had doubled. The marketing team now builds and edits pages on its own.

HighPath and Bent Pixels: six weeks each

We took HighPath from Wix to Framer in six weeks. We moved Bent Pixels from Webflow to Framer in six weeks, onto a CMS its own team runs. Both moves were planned around what already earned traffic and what the team needed to change afterwards.

Zen Educate: page by page, with no downtime

Zen Educate is a Series B edtech company operating across the UK and US. Its site was slow to update and was blocking growth experiments. We migrated it to Framer page by page with zero downtime, built UK and US variant components and rewired the marketing stack from Google Tag Manager to Zoho.

What your team can edit after launch

A migration only helps if your team can use the new site. In each project we hand over a CMS and component library, plus documentation, video walkthroughs and training. At Waste Logics, the marketing team that could not edit its WordPress site now publishes campaign pages itself.

When you should not migrate to Framer

Do not migrate if your site depends on heavy plugins or complex back-end logic that Framer does not replace, if you only need a one-off page with no CMS or scaling need, or if your stack needs a code framework for app-like behaviour. When code is the right call, we build in Astro or Next.js instead, with the same redirect and SEO process.