A site that changes platform or domain keeps its search traffic only if the old addresses lead somewhere. A missing redirect is a page that quietly disappears from results a few weeks later.
The steps
- Export every address the old site has: the sitemap, the CMS collections, and the pages search engines actually index.
- Match each one to its new address. AI does the first pass on names and content, and I review every row.
- Flag pages with no match and decide: send them to the closest parent page, or let them go.
- Load the map, then crawl the old list against the new site and fix anything that does not land on a live page.
- Watch Search Console for two weeks.
How big the job is
On a site with a few hundred CMS pages this is a spreadsheet, not a project. Most of the rows follow a pattern, and the pattern can be written as one rule. The work is in the exceptions.