Car Dealer Website Migration Checklist

What to settle before you give notice, what to test during cutover, and what to watch for thirty days after launch.

A dealer website change is not a design project. It is a data and plumbing project wearing a design project's clothes. The pages look better on launch day, and the damage, when there is damage, shows up two to six weeks later in traffic reports and lead counts.

Three things break most often. Organic traffic drops because vehicle detail pages, model research pages and any article content changed address and nobody mapped the old URLs to the new ones. Leads quietly stop arriving because a form posts somewhere that no longer exists, or posts in a format your CRM does not parse. And phone attribution goes blank because your tracking numbers were replaced by whatever the new provider ships by default.

None of those announce themselves. A broken checkout screams. A broken lead form sits there looking perfectly normal, accepts the customer's information, thanks them politely, and sends it nowhere. Your salespeople do not notice, because you cannot miss a lead you never knew existed. That is why this checklist front loads testing and puts design review last.

The other thing worth saying up front: most of the work below happens before you sign with the new provider, not after. Once notice is given, your leverage with the outgoing vendor drops to almost nothing, and the assets you did not secure become very hard to get.

Work through this list while you are still a paying customer in good standing. Every item is something dealers routinely discover they do not control at the worst possible moment.

The domain. Log into your registrar. If you cannot, find out who can. A surprising number of stores discover their website vendor registered the domain and holds it. That is not automatically bad faith, but it is a dependency you want removed before a change, not during one.

DNS. Know where your DNS is hosted and confirm you have administrative access. Cutover is a DNS event. If a vendor controls DNS, they control your launch timing.

Analytics and Search Console. The property should be owned by a dealership email address with the vendor added as a user, not the other way around. If the vendor owns the property, your historical data can walk out the door with them. Same for Google Business Profile and any ad accounts.

Content and media. Photos, video, staff bios, articles and any custom page copy. Get an export. Ask specifically whether vehicle photography taken by the vendor's photographer belongs to you.

Call tracking numbers. Ask, in writing, whether the numbers can be ported to you and what the process is. Numbers you have printed on a billboard or listed in a directory are worth defending.

The contract. Read the notice window and the auto renewal clause before you plan the timeline, not after. Our website RFP template lists the terms worth pinning down with the incoming vendor at the same time.

If you do one thing on this list properly, do this one. Search engines have years of history pointed at your current addresses. A migration without a redirect map throws that away and you will spend six months earning it back.

Build the map from three sources rather than one. Export every URL your analytics recorded a visit to in the last twelve months. Export the pages Search Console shows impressions for. And crawl the current site so you catch pages nobody visits but other sites link to. Combine them, remove duplicates, and sort by traffic so you know what actually matters.

Then map old to new, one page to one page, wherever a real equivalent exists. The lazy version, redirecting everything that does not match to the homepage, is worse than useless because search engines treat a mass redirect to the homepage as a soft removal.

Vehicle detail pages need their own decision, because inventory turns. A sold vehicle's page should not redirect to the homepage either. Send it to the relevant model or body style search results, which is closer to what the visitor wanted. Decide the rule once and apply it programmatically.

Test the map before launch on a staging environment, then again in the first hour after launch. Watch for redirect chains, where an old URL bounces through two or three hops before landing. Keep the map in place for at least a year. A dealership SEO audit after launch is the cheapest way to catch what the map missed.

Your website is downstream of an inventory feed. During a migration that feed has to be repointed, and every third party consuming it has to be repointed too. Make the list before cutover week: your website, your syndication partners, your ad platforms, your chat vendor, and anything else that displays a vehicle.

The details that cause trouble are boring and specific. Photo counts and photo ordering often change between providers, so a car with twenty images can arrive with four. Sold vehicle removal timing differs, which means a unit you delivered on Friday is still advertised on Monday and a customer drives forty miles for it. Comment fields and price rules do not always carry across, so a vehicle can publish at the wrong price for a few hours.

Set the expectation that your first feed load will be wrong somewhere, and schedule someone to compare a sample of thirty vehicles between the old site and the new one before you flip DNS. Check price, mileage, photo count, options text and the VIN itself.

Inventory Link can ingest a feed and serve it back out through a public inventory API and per salesperson inventory sites, which is useful during a change because it gives you a place vehicles are still visible while the main site is being rebuilt. Neither a feed nor a DMS connection is required to run the rest of the platform, so your lead and CRM side does not depend on the feed being healthy. More on the mechanics at inventory feed management.

This is the section that saves real money, and it is almost always rushed. Every lead path on the old site has to exist on the new site, post to the right place, and arrive in a format your CRM understands.

Inventory the paths first. Contact form, vehicle inquiry, test drive request, trade appraisal, finance application, service request, newsletter signup, chat, text to a tracking number, and any landing pages running behind paid ads. Independent stores usually find between eight and fifteen. Groups find more.

Then test each one with a real submission using your own name and your own phone number, and follow it all the way through. Did it reach the CRM? Did it carry the correct source label? Did it route to the right person under your rules? Did the automated response actually send? A form that delivers with a blank source is not a success, because in ninety days you will not be able to tell paid traffic from organic.

LeadLocate accepts inbound lead flow through lead feeds and custom source feeds, and applies global lead distribution rules with distribution lists on top, so routing survives a website change even when the form on the front end is brand new. Lead history records where each lead went, which settles the inevitable argument about whether a store received something.

Phone deserves its own pass. Confirm which numbers appear on which pages, that forwarding still lands where it should, and that after hours routing behaves. AutoMail handles IVR, call routing and forwarding independently of your website, so an inbound call path can stay stable through the launch. If you want the attribution side to survive too, read website lead attribution before you launch rather than after.

Being direct, because it changes how you should use this page. We do not sell full dealer websites. There is no dealership content management system, no OEM compliant website program, and no franchise site templates from us. If that is what you are shopping for, evaluate website platforms on their own merits and use this checklist to run the project.

What we do provide sits alongside a website rather than replacing it. Lead pages, which is a landing page builder with per page URL settings, so campaign traffic can land somewhere you control while the main site is mid rebuild. Personal salesperson websites, so individual people keep a presence during the change. A free live chat widget you can place on whatever site you end up running. Customer facing deal pages with e signature, so a worked deal is a link you send rather than a photograph of a worksheet.

That combination is genuinely useful during a migration for one reason: it decouples lead capture from the site rebuild. Stores that run every campaign through their main website have to pause marketing during a launch. Stores with a separate landing page layer do not.

The comparison work on providers, if you are still choosing, is at website provider alternatives, and the capability side is at dealer website platform.

A sequence that has fewer surprises than doing it all on Friday afternoon.

1. Lower the DNS time to live to five minutes at least twenty four hours before you plan to switch, so a rollback is fast if you need one.
2. Freeze content changes on the old site. Anything published after the crawl will not be in your redirect map.
3. Load and verify inventory on the new site, then compare thirty vehicles against the old one by hand.
4. Submit a test lead from every form path and confirm arrival, source label and routing in the CRM.
5. Confirm tracking numbers appear correctly and that calls forward, including after hours.
6. Publish the redirect map and spot check the top fifty old URLs.
7. Flip DNS on a Tuesday or Wednesday morning, never a Friday, and never the day before a holiday weekend. You want your vendor's engineers awake and available.
8. Re verify forms immediately after propagation, because a form that worked on staging can fail on the live domain over a certificate or a spam filter rule.
9. Submit the new sitemap in Search Console and request indexing on your highest value pages.
10. Keep read access to the old platform for thirty to sixty days. You will need something from it.

Launch day going smoothly is not evidence that the migration succeeded. Most migration damage is visible only in the trend, so somebody has to own watching it.

Check the not found report in Search Console twice a week for the first month and add redirects for anything with real volume. Watch indexed page counts, because a large drop usually means a technical block rather than a ranking problem, and a stray disallow rule left over from staging is the single most common cause.

On the lead side, compare weekly counts by source against the same weeks before launch. A drop in one source with the others flat almost always means a broken path rather than a market change. Repeat the full form test weekly for four weeks. It costs twenty minutes and it has caught problems in stores that were certain everything was fine.

Also watch page speed on mobile. New sites frequently launch heavier than the site they replaced, and slow vehicle pages cost leads before anyone types anything. The practical detail behind that is covered in Core Web Vitals for dealer websites.

One honest caution to set expectations with your general manager in advance: a well executed migration usually still shows a modest dip in organic traffic for a few weeks while search engines process the change. That is normal. A dip that has not recovered by week eight is not, and by then you want the redirect map in front of somebody who knows what to do with it.

Take these into the conversation with the provider you are leaving and the one you are joining. Get the answers in writing, in email, from a named person.

To the outgoing vendor: what is the exact notice period and the renewal date? What will you provide on exit, in what format, and how long do I keep access afterward? Do you hold my domain, DNS, analytics property or Google Business Profile? Can my tracking numbers be ported, and what is the process? Who owns the photography on my vehicle pages?

To the incoming vendor: who builds the redirect map, you or me, and is it included? How is my inventory feed ingested and what is the update frequency? Which form paths do you support out of the box and how do leads reach my CRM? Can I keep my own tracking numbers? What is the contract length and the cancellation process? What happens to my content if I leave you in three years?

That last question is the one that separates vendors quickly, and the reason to ask it on day one is that you will never have more leverage than the moment before signature. It is also why our own products are sold month to month with no long term contract. A vendor that needs a multi year commitment to win your business is telling you something about how confident they are in month four. Current figures are on the pricing page, and you can just ask us directly whether the landing page and chat layer covers what you need during a rebuild.

Does LeadLocate build dealership websites?

No. We do not sell full dealer websites, a dealership content management system or OEM compliant website programs. We provide lead pages, personal salesperson websites, a free live chat widget and customer facing deal pages that work alongside whatever website platform you choose.

How long before a launch should we start the checklist?

Four to six weeks is realistic for a single store, longer for a group. The domain, DNS and analytics ownership items should be handled before you give notice, because your leverage with the outgoing vendor drops the moment you do.

What is the most common migration mistake?

Skipping the URL map, or building it only from the sitemap. Pull URLs from analytics, Search Console and a full crawl, then map old pages to real equivalents. Redirecting unmatched pages to the homepage is treated as a removal and loses the history.

Will our leads keep arriving during the change?

Only if you test every form path and confirm each one delivers with the correct source label. Running campaigns through separate lead pages rather than the main site keeps capture working while the site is being rebuilt.

Should we change our call tracking numbers at the same time?

Try not to. Changing numbers and platforms in the same week makes it impossible to tell which change caused a swing in call volume. Ask about porting before you sign, and keep printed and directory numbers stable.

How much traffic loss is normal after a migration?

A modest short term dip while search engines process the change is common, and recovery usually happens over several weeks. We cannot guarantee an outcome, since it depends on the quality of your redirect map and the new site's speed and structure.

See lead pages, the live chat widget and salesperson sites running independently of your website platform. Month to month, no long term contract.