Small Business Website Replatforming Checklist

Replatforming moves a website to a different CMS, hosted service, commerce system, or custom stack. It can improve ownership, editing, performance, or integrations, but it also creates migration risk.

Write down the reason for the move before choosing a platform. A new interface will not fix unclear content ownership or a broken lead process by itself.

Document the current site

Inventory URLs, templates, content, forms, images, redirects, analytics, integrations, accounts, domains, DNS, and third-party scripts. Identify pages that receive traffic, leads, links, or customer questions.

Define ownership and requirements

Decide who owns the domain, code, hosting, accounts, content, data, and support. List editing needs, permissions, publishing workflow, performance expectations, accessibility requirements, and required integrations.

The platform comparison guide helps structure the decision.

Protect search and customer paths

Map old URLs to new URLs, preserve useful content, plan redirects, update canonicals, regenerate the sitemap, and keep internal links current. Test forms, booking, payments, search, account access, and confirmation pages.

The redirect audit and migration guide cover the SEO side.

Use a real staging process

Build with representative content and data. Test mobile, keyboard access, forms, analytics, integrations, error pages, permissions, images, speed, and security before the launch window.

Prepare cutover and rollback

Schedule a change window, back up the current site, lower DNS uncertainty where appropriate, document the deployment steps, and define how to roll back if a critical workflow fails.

Monitor after launch

Check status codes, redirects, indexing, forms, calls, analytics, uptime, search performance, and user feedback. Keep a short list of issues, owners, and deadlines instead of declaring success at deployment.