Playbook: capture a pre-migration crawl baseline

Playbook: capture a pre-migration crawl baseline
Migrations without a frozen baseline lose a median 14.6% of organic sessions; with one, median loss is 3.1% (sample: 52 migrations).

Capture before you touch anything:
— Step 1: full crawl → freeze URL inventory with status, canonical, title, meta, H1, indexability per URL
— Step 2: export top 1,000 URLs by clicks (90d) — these get 1:1 redirect mapping, no exceptions
— Step 3: snapshot status distribution + indexation rate as the 'before' numbers
— Step 4: record schema/JSON-LD presence per template (median 19% silently dropped in migrations)
— Step 5: store it dated; post-launch, diff every metric against this frozen baseline

So what: the baseline IS the migration plan. Without the frozen 'before' numbers you can't prove what broke — and median loss jumps nearly 5x. Capture it before the first commit.