Post-Launch SEO Monitoring: The 30-Day Window Where Migrations Win or Lose

A site migration goes live. The team celebrates. DNS has propagated, the new frontend looks great, and performance scores are better than the old site ever was. Everyone moves on.

Three weeks later, someone checks the Analytics dashboard and notices that organic sessions are down 35% compared to the same period last month. A panicked Search Console audit reveals that 40 pages dropped out of the index sometime in week two. No alerts were configured. No one was watching. By the time the problem is caught, Google has had three weeks to cement a new (unfavorable) understanding of the site's structure.

This scenario plays out on almost every migration where post-launch monitoring is treated as optional. The first 30 days after a migration launch are when the outcomes are determined — not the build phase, not the DNS cutover, but the 30-day window when Google recrawls and re-evaluates the entire site.

This post covers exactly what to monitor, how to monitor it, what regressions typically appear and when, and how to escalate effectively when something goes wrong.

Quick Checklist

Set up Google Search Console for the new domain (or verify ownership if same domain)
Submit the updated XML sitemap on launch day
Monitor indexing coverage daily for 30 days (look for drops in "Valid" pages)
Check crawl stats: Googlebot should be crawling all key URLs within 7 days
Compare pre-launch vs post-launch impressions and clicks (weekly)
Validate rich results are still appearing for pages that had them
Watch for soft 404s (200-status pages with thin/empty content)
Set up alerts for crawl errors exceeding your pre-launch baseline

Why the First 30 Days After Launch Are Critical

Google does not immediately recrawl your entire site when it changes. It works through a crawl queue based on page authority, internal linking, sitemap submission, and historical crawl frequency. After a migration, some pages get recrawled within hours. Others take 2–3 weeks.

This creates a dangerous window. On launch day, much of your site's indexed state reflects the old configuration. Google still has the old pages in its index, pointing to old URLs. As it begins recrawling, it discovers the new structure — new URLs if the architecture changed, new HTML if the frontend framework changed, new redirect paths if the URL mapping was altered.

If anything is misconfigured in the new setup — wrong canonicals, missing redirects, noindex tags that survived from staging, thin content on rebuilt pages — Google learns about those problems during this recrawl window and updates its index accordingly. By the time those updates are visible in Search Console data, the recrawl has already happened. The damage is done.

The only way to intervene is to catch issues before Google processes them — which means monitoring Search Console data daily, not weekly, during the first 30 days.

What to Monitor in Google Search Console (Daily for 30 Days)

Google Search Console is the primary tool for post-launch monitoring. It is the only direct window into how Google sees and indexes your site. The three reports that matter most in the first 30 days are indexing coverage, crawl stats, and the rich results status.

Indexing Coverage: Watch for Dropped Pages

The Coverage report (under Indexing > Pages in the new Search Console interface) shows how many pages Google considers "Valid" — properly indexed and appearing in search results. Your baseline is the Valid page count from the day before launch.

After launch, this number may dip briefly as Google begins recrawling under the new configuration. A dip of 2–5% in the first week is common and usually recovers. A dip of more than 10% is a signal worth investigating immediately. A dip that continues to widen through week 2 and week 3 without recovery is a redirect or canonical problem.

Check the "Excluded" tab as well. The specific exclusion reasons tell you why pages are not being indexed: "Alternate page with proper canonical tag" means Google found a canonical pointing elsewhere. "Crawled — currently not indexed" means Google reached the page but chose not to index it (often thin content). "Page with redirect" may indicate a redirect loop.

The most alarming exclusion reason post-migration is "Excluded by 'noindex' tag" on pages that should be indexed. This typically means a staging noindex tag survived the launch — carried over from a robots.txt or meta tag that was never removed from the production configuration.

Crawl Stats: Is Googlebot Finding Your New Pages?

Crawl Stats (under Settings > Crawl Stats) shows how frequently Googlebot is visiting your site and what HTTP response codes it is receiving. After a migration, you want to see Googlebot actively crawling — visiting pages and receiving 200 (OK) responses.

Watch for spikes in 301 redirects. A high redirect ratio means Googlebot is following a lot of redirects, which can indicate redirect chains (A redirects to B, B redirects to C) or redirect loops. Redirect chains waste crawl budget and slow down indexing. They should be cleaned up so every redirect goes directly from the old URL to the final destination.

Watch for 404 responses. Any meaningful 404 traffic after migration means Googlebot is finding URLs that no longer exist without a redirect. These are typically caused by redirect mapping gaps — old URLs that were in the redirect map but were missed during implementation, or internal links on the new site that still point to old URL patterns.

Rich Results: Are Schema-Powered Features Still Appearing?

The Rich Results Status report shows which pages have valid structured data and which are producing rich results in search (FAQ snippets, article authorship, breadcrumbs, etc.). After a migration, this report can reveal schema that was generating rich results in WordPress and Yoast but was not ported to the new frontend.

A post-migration drop in rich results is not always immediately visible in rankings. It may take 2–4 weeks for Google to stop displaying the rich result after the structured data disappears. By the time you notice the visual change in the SERP, the schema has been gone for weeks.

Check the Enhancements reports daily and validate any pages flagged with errors using Google's Rich Results Test. Fix schema errors within the 30-day window while Google is actively recrawling — this is when fixes get incorporated most quickly.

The 5 Regressions That Show Up in Week 2–4 (Not Week 1)

Post-launch monitoring is often abandoned after 7–10 days when everything looks stable. This is a mistake. The most common and damaging regressions appear in week 2–4.

1. Redirect chain unwinding. Google initially follows redirect chains from old URLs. In week 2–4, it may begin flagging the intermediate URLs as separate pages, or stop following chains that are too long. Single-hop redirects (A to B) should be the standard; chains longer than two hops need to be collapsed.

2. Thin content signals. Rebuilt pages that are technically live but have substantially less content than their WordPress originals may be crawled quickly in week 1 but evaluated for quality in week 2–4. Pages with thin content that previously ranked on content quality alone are the most vulnerable.

3. Internal link equity shifts. When URL structure changes in a migration, internal links across the site need to be updated to point to new URLs (not rely entirely on redirects). Pages that lose internal link equity because they are now reachable only through redirect chains may see ranking declines in week 3–4.

4. Sitemap staleness. If the sitemap is not dynamically updated when new content is published, Googlebot may encounter sitemap URLs that 404 (content removed) or redirect (URLs that changed post-launch). A stale sitemap reduces crawl efficiency and delays new content indexing.

5. Core Web Vitals degradation. CWV data in Search Console is collected from real user visits over a 28-day rolling window. A CWV regression from the migration may not appear in Search Console data until 4–6 weeks post-launch — long after the daily monitoring window is typically closed.

Automated Monitoring vs Manual Spot-Checks

Daily Search Console monitoring for 30 days requires discipline. A structured approach separates automated signal collection from manual investigation.

Automated monitoring means setting up alerts that fire when specific thresholds are crossed: a drop in Valid indexed pages beyond a defined percentage, a crawl error rate spike, or a coverage report change. Google Search Console does not have robust native alerting, but third-party tools (Semrush, Ahrefs, Screaming Frog Scheduler) can be configured to poll for changes.

Manual spot-checks are the complement to automated alerts. Each day, a human checks the Coverage report, scans the crawl stats for anomalies, and runs the URL Inspection Tool on a rotating set of priority pages — the pages that drive the most organic traffic. This catches issues that automated thresholds might not — a single high-value page with a misconfigured canonical, for example, would not necessarily trigger a coverage-level alert but would be caught in a manual spot-check.

The combination of automated alerts and daily manual checks is the baseline for responsible post-launch monitoring. Automated alerts catch aggregate problems early. Manual checks catch individual page issues before they aggregate.

When to Escalate: Signs You Need Professional Help

Not every post-launch SEO issue requires professional intervention. A handful of 404 errors, a minor dip in coverage that recovers in a few days — these are within normal range for a migration.

The signs that you need professional intervention:

Coverage drops more than 15% from your launch-day baseline and does not recover within 5 business days. This indicates a systemic problem — likely a redirect mapping gap, a robots.txt issue, or a canonical tag misconfiguration across a large portion of the site.

Organic impressions drop 30% or more in the week-over-week comparison in Search Console's Performance report. Impression drops precede ranking drops — Google is showing your pages less in search results, which means ranking changes are coming.

You find pages indexed at WordPress backend URLs (if you have a headless architecture) rather than at your frontend domain. This means the WordPress backend is being indexed and competing with the frontend for the same content.

Rich results disappear from the Enhancements report for pages that previously had them and those pages were in the top 20% of organic traffic. Rich result loss on high-traffic pages compounds ranking risk.

In these scenarios, the recovery window is narrow. Every day that passes with an active indexing or canonical problem is a day Google reinforces its understanding of the misconfigured state.

How SEOParity Ops Handles Post-Launch Monitoring

The 30-day post-launch monitoring window is included in every SEOParity rebuild engagement. For clients who continue beyond the initial rebuild, SEOParity Ops provides ongoing monitoring with a 24-hour SLA response window.

Ops monitoring covers the same signals described in this post — coverage, crawl stats, rich results, CWV data, and Performance report trends — but with structured reporting and escalation protocols. A monthly report surfaces trends before they become problems. The 24-hour SLA means that when a regression is identified, diagnosis and a fix plan are delivered the next business day — not in two weeks when someone gets around to checking the dashboard.

For sites where what's included in our migration service is the question, Ops is the answer to "what happens after launch." It is the monitoring infrastructure that keeps the migration gains intact as Google continues to recrawl and update the site's indexed state over the weeks and months following launch.

If you have already had a migration and you are seeing ranking drops or coverage issues, the triage process described here applies whether the migration was done with SEOParity or with another team. The signals are the same. The priority sequence is the same.

For sites where traffic dropped and the cause is unclear, the post on what to do when traffic drops after redesign covers the diagnostic framework in more detail.

Building a 30-Day Monitoring Calendar

A monitoring calendar makes the daily check habitual rather than reactive. Here is a simple structure:

Days 1–7 (launch week): Check Search Console daily. Focus on the Coverage report Valid page count, crawl stats for 404 and redirect rates, and the URL Inspection Tool on your top 10 pages. Submit the sitemap if not already done. Confirm Googlebot is crawling the new URLs within 3 days of launch.

Days 8–14: Continue daily Coverage monitoring. Add a weekly comparison of impressions and clicks (current week vs the same week pre-migration). Run a full crawl of the new site using Screaming Frog or a similar tool to surface any 404s or redirect chains that may not be visible in Search Console yet.

Days 15–21: Coverage should be stabilizing. If it is not, escalate. Check the Enhancements report for schema changes. Run Google's Rich Results Test on your top 5 content pages. Compare click-through rates in the Performance report — a drop in CTR can indicate that titles or meta descriptions are not rendering correctly in search results.

Days 22–30: Final check of all signals. Compare total indexed pages pre-launch vs current. Document the final Coverage count, Performance trends, and any open issues. If proceeding to Ops, this documentation becomes the baseline for ongoing monitoring.

FAQ

How soon after launch will I see SEO changes in Google Search Console?

Crawl stats and URL Inspection data begin updating within 24–72 hours of launch. Coverage report data typically takes 3–7 days to reflect significant changes. Performance data (impressions and clicks) has a 2–3 day lag and is shown as a rolling average, so dramatic changes take several days to appear clearly. Do not expect all data to be stable and accurate in the first 48 hours — but do begin checking daily from day one.

What's the most important metric to monitor after a site migration?

The Coverage report's Valid page count is the single most important metric. It tells you directly whether Google is successfully indexing your pages. A stable or growing Valid count means the migration's indexing configuration is working correctly. A declining Valid count means pages are being excluded or removed from the index — which requires immediate investigation regardless of how rankings look at that moment.

How long should I actively monitor SEO after a migration?

Daily monitoring for 30 days is the minimum. After that, weekly monitoring for another 60 days is recommended for sites with meaningful organic traffic. Google's understanding of a migrated site continues to update for 3–6 months after launch — CWV data, link equity reassessment, and content quality signals all accumulate over time. The daily intensity tapers, but monitoring should not stop at 30 days.

What are soft 404s and why do they matter post-launch?

A soft 404 is a page that returns an HTTP 200 (OK) status code but contains little or no meaningful content. Google detects these by comparing the content of a page to what a typical 200 response should contain. After a migration, soft 404s often appear when page templates are rebuilt but content fails to load correctly — the page exists and returns 200, but the CMS content did not populate. Google will typically remove soft 404 pages from the index, which shows up as "Crawled — currently not indexed" in the Coverage report.

Does SEOParity Ops include regression fixes, or just monitoring?

Ops includes both monitoring and regression fixes within the monthly retainer scope. Monitoring without the ability to fix identified regressions is of limited value — it tells you something is wrong but does not resolve it. The 24-hour SLA covers diagnosis and a fix plan. Regression fixes that fall within the standard operational scope (configuration errors, redirect updates, schema fixes, canonical tag corrections) are included. New feature development or significant scope changes outside the original migration are treated separately.

Next Steps

Post-launch monitoring is not glamorous. It is daily, repetitive, and detail-oriented. But it is the difference between a migration that holds its rankings and one that loses 30% of its organic traffic in the first month while the team is busy on the next project.

If you have a migration coming up or you have recently launched and want structured monitoring in place, SEOParity Ops provides the monitoring infrastructure and response SLA so regressions get caught and fixed before they compound.

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