Post-migration redirect checklist
After a move (new domain, http to https, www to apex, a new CMS), the redirects you set decide whether visitors and search engines follow you. Most migrations leave a few loose ends: chains of two or three hops, your own pages still linking to the old address, and pages that quietly became 404. This checklist covers them, and step 3 shows a crawl that finds the loose ends in minutes.
The checklist
- Old URL map. Keep a list of every old URL that mattered (from your sitemap, analytics or Search Console) and where each should land.
- One hop, permanent. Each old URL should reach the new one in a single 301, not 302 and not a chain.
- Crawl from the old address. Start the crawl at the old home page (for example the plain http version) and let it follow what a visitor would. This finds chains, loops and dead ends you did not map.
- Fix internal links to point straight at the final address. If your own menu still links to the old host, every click costs a redirect.
- Check for broken targets. Pages left behind in the move return 404; list them and redirect or restore.
- Canonicals and sitemap. Both must name the new address, not the old one.
- noindex. Staging sites often carry a noindex or an X-Robots-Tag header; confirm it did not ship to production.
- Re-submit and watch. Submit the new sitemap in Search Console and re-crawl weekly for a month.
Step 3 on real output
norvig.com serves its pages on the www host and answers the bare domain with a redirect. That is the same pattern as a www change, so the run is a fair picture of what the crawl reports. The Actor records, for every page, the status, the number of redirects and the chain itself.
| Finding | Result |
|---|---|
| Pages reached through a redirect | 12 of 15 |
| Chain shape | one hop each: norvig.com/bio.html answers 301, then www.norvig.com/bio.html answers 200 |
| Why | Pages link to each other on the bare domain and the server redirects each click to www |
| Broken internal link | norvig.com/einstein.html answers 404, linked from the home page (severity high) |
| Issue code | redirected, low severity, with the fix hint to link the final address directly |
One hop is acceptable, and the chain is not the emergency here; the 404 is. That ordering is the point of ranked output: the redirect warnings (12 pages) are numerous and low, the single broken link is rare and high. After a real migration expect the opposite problem, chains of two hops from old to interim to new, and those show as a longer redirectChain on the same rows.
Running it
Open the SEO Site Audit, paste the old address as the website, set the page cap above your page count, and turn on checkLinks to include uncrawled targets such as PDFs and images, which migrations often break. The fix list downloads as CSV: one row per issue with the URL, severity and what to change.
Cost
The run above cost $0.176 (15 pages at $0.008, 56 links at $0.001). A 500-page site is $4.00 for pages; the link check is optional.
See also: what an SEO crawl checks and broken external links.
Try it: SEO Site Audit on Apify. $0.008 per page audited, $0.001 per link checked (optional). The Apify free plan includes monthly credit, so a test run costs nothing out of pocket.