Sitemoth migrations and imports

Site migration

Crawl the old site and the new one (a staging site works), then open Analyze, Site migration and pick both crawl files. Sitemoth matches every old page to a new page by exact path, moved folders, URL slug, title, H1 and content. Each match has a confidence score and a reason, and Sitemoth never maps to a broken or noindex page. Review the matches, change any target, and export the redirects:

  • A redirect map as CSV.
  • Apache .htaccess rules.
  • An Nginx map.
  • Cloudflare Bulk Redirects as CSV.
  • Netlify _redirects.
  • vercel.json.
  • A WordPress Redirection plugin import.

After launch, press Check redirects after launch. Sitemoth requests every old URL and reports redirects that go to the wrong page, chain through several hops, use a temporary 302, loop or end on a 404.

Importing from Screaming Frog

File, Import from Screaming Frog opens Screaming Frog exports as a Sitemoth crawl file. Export Internal, All from Screaming Frog, and Bulk Export, Links, All Inlinks for the link graph. Sitemoth also reads the Response Codes, Directives, Hreflang and Images exports if you add them. Sitemoth then runs the checks that work from those fields, so issues appear as in a normal crawl. Checks that need page HTML, such as structured data, need a Sitemoth crawl.

Sitemoth does not read .seospider crawl files or Screaming Frog configuration files, because both are in Screaming Frog's own format. Include and exclude lists and custom extraction rules can be pasted as text.

Shopify and WordPress presets

Sitemoth detects Shopify, WordPress, Wix, Squarespace and Webflow from the crawl. Set Platform preset to Auto, Shopify or WordPress in Configuration to apply crawl rules for the platform:

  • The Shopify preset skips the cart, checkout, account and search pages and treats sort and filter parameters as duplicates.
  • The WordPress preset skips feeds, the REST API, search results and reply links.

The Platform tab then flags problems typical for the platform, such as collection product URLs that are not canonicalized, indexable filter URLs, attachment pages and thin tag or author archives.

sitemoth import-sf internal_all.csv --inlinks all_inlinks.csv -o imported.sitemoth
sitemoth migrate old.sitemoth new.sitemoth --format nginx -o redirects.map
sitemoth validate-redirects redirects.csv
sitemoth crawl https://shop.example.com --platform auto

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