Website Migration Checklist: Switch Vendors, Keep the Calls

A website switch loses calls through what nobody wrote down: who holds each account, and which phone numbers, forms and links the old site carries. That gap got more expensive in October. Counting repeats, ChatGPT printed about 6.4 times as many phone numbers per answer after Oct. 9, 2026 (Cheers Market Baseline, our research panel). If your old vendor lets a tracking number go, AI answers, profiles and directories can keep showing it after it stops ringing your office.

Last verified: November 1, 2026.

On a sales call this fall, an owner told me a past switch broke their Google Analytics tracking. The fix is mostly order, in six steps; the redirect and hosting rules in steps 4 to 6 come from Google's own guides.

Who owns your website? Put these 10 accounts on one sheet

Seven belong in your company's name; the other three can sit with a vendor if the contract says how and how fast they come back. Write down who holds each one today, then log in and check. Ask any new vendor to answer the same ten lines in writing before you sign.

In your company's name:

• Domain, at the registrar: your company is registrant, on a company email, with auto-renew on. Check the registrant, contact email and expiry date; get the registrar login, or a transfer to you, in writing.
• Website code and content: a repository in your account, or a full export. Ask for read access or download an export, and get in writing who owns the design, code and content (ask counsel).
• Google Analytics and Search Console: a company login is account-level Administrator and verified Search Console owner. Check account-level access and Search Console users, and get a move out of any Analytics account the vendor created.
• Google Tag Manager: the container sits in your account and a company login has Admin and Publish. Read the users and container permissions; get every container the site loads, and whose account it's in, in writing.
• Google Business Profiles: your company is primary owner and vendors are managers. Open each profile's people-and-access settings, and get the vendor's confirmation that it holds no primary ownership.
• Call-tracking account and numbers: in your name, or the contract moves them to you when you leave. Ask for every tracking number and its account, and get in writing whether each ports to you and everywhere it's published.
• Google Ads and Local Services Ads: a company login is Admin and the vendor uses a manager account without ownership. Read the access list and linked managers, check Local Services Ads separately, and get Admin for your login plus every page your ads point to.

With a vendor, as long as the contract covers it:

• Hosting, plus any CDN or firewall: how long the site stays up after notice, and a full copy. Ask who holds the hosting and CDN accounts; get the wind-down period, export format and who moves the domain in writing.
• DNS, including email and verification records: a full zone copy, with MX, SPF, DKIM and the Search Console TXT record. Look up who runs your nameservers (often the CDN), take a zone export now, and get in writing that email and verification records move with the domain.
• CMS admin and publishing rights: a company admin login, plus a written list of who publishes and approves. Log in to the admin area yourself, and get admin access and a list of which plugins or licenses the vendor holds.

Start with the domain, since a stranger can end up owning it. ICANN puts sole responsibility on the registrant, and a domain under a former employee's or vendor's email can expire unseen and, once released, go to anyone. Buying a company? Fill in this sheet before close.

Seeing the reports doesn't mean you control the account. In Google Analytics, only an account-level Administrator can delete users, so a property in a vendor-created account stays the vendor's even if you administer it.

Business Profiles come with a wait. Only the primary owner can transfer primary ownership, and a new owner or manager waits 7 days before every feature opens, so settle it weeks ahead. If a vendor or former owner holds that role, see our guide to transferring Business Profile ownership; our profile access guide covers managers and agencies.

List what the old site does, phones first

A lost number fails silently. List every number the old site shows, its account, whether it ports to you and everywhere it's published, from profiles and ads to directories and trucks. Tracking numbers go at the top, since they can sit in someone else's account, and one on a truck wrap is first to port because changing it means a new wrap.

ChatGPT doesn't always print the number on the business's own site. Of the US numbers it printed from Oct. 2 to 31, 2026, 41.0% weren't on the site in the pages we checked when that site ran a call-tracking script, against 12.1% when it didn't. Match every number AI prints to the company's tracking inventory before retiring a line.

So decide which tracking numbers stay on the site, profile and ads before moving any; our call-tracking guide covers keeping them consistent.

Ads can ring a number you didn't pick, too. Search Engine Roundtable reported on Sept. 25, 2026 that one advertiser's local ads showed his Business Profile number, not his call-asset number; Google said location ads may do that with "both location and call assets." Call both on launch day.

Keep any call-recording notice, since some states require every party's consent (ask counsel), and any notice that your chat widget or AI receptionist is software.

Forms, schedulers, chat and tags

Go page by page, noting where each item delivers, since a rebuild that drops a theme or plugin loses the schema or forms it wrote. The shares below come from 976 US contractor homepages we read on Nov. 1, 2026, so whole sites would run higher.

Tap-to-call phone links showed up on 86.0%, so tap each one on a phone and check the number it dials. LocalBusiness schema sat on 54.6% (47.0% included the phone); search the new page source for LocalBusiness and check its phone.

Forms appeared on 48.3%, and each needs a test submission that you then find as a lead in the inbox or CRM behind it, since a thank-you page proves nothing. A CAPTCHA or anti-spam check loaded on 16.8% (30.9% of those with a form), so submit each form from a phone on cellular data too. At least 12.0% loaded a scheduler or request form: book a test job, find it in the software, then cancel it.

We didn't measure chat widgets, AI receptionists or tags. Send each chat widget or AI receptionist a test message or call and see where it lands, and watch every analytics, Tag Manager, ad-conversion and call-tracking tag fire in its tool's preview or real-time view.

Take a two-week baseline

Before launch, pull two full weeks of calls by number, form submissions by destination and booked jobs. If the vendor holds the call-tracking account, export those weeks before notice.

Keep AI referral counts beside the lead baseline, with tracking changes marked. Sistrix found ChatGPT tagged as few as 1% of source links a day from Oct. 9 to 15, and visits without a campaign tag or usable referrer can appear as Direct. That gap belongs in the comparison so a change in attribution isn't mistaken for a change in demand.

Map every URL, then fix the links that point at them

Google's guide to moving a site, updated Aug. 20, 2026, recommends server-side permanent redirects (301 or 308) to relevant replacement pages, generally kept at least a year. A removed page with no relevant replacement should return 404 or 410 rather than redirecting everyone to the homepage. Keep working URLs where you can; each is a redirect you don't need.

Open each Business Profile, tap the website button and note the exact page it opens, including anything after a question mark. If that page moves, change the link on launch day; the redirect only covers the gap. Brands with many profiles should edit from an owner or manager account and recheck days later. Do the same for each ad and Local Services Ads landing page on the Google Ads line, and map each profile's location-page link before launch.

Launch day: test every lead path and keep a way back

Start a week early. Google's hosting-change guide, updated Dec. 10, 2025, says to lower the DNS TTL to a few hours so the launch and any rollback take hold faster. A rollback plan must preserve leads, submissions and content changes received after launch.

On the day, run every test from the forms section above, calling each number from a phone off the office's caller list, and email a company address from outside, since the DNS just moved. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt (it should list the new sitemap, with no leftover `Disallow: /`), then check both HTML robots tags and X-Robots-Tag response headers on the homepage and representative service and location pages. Behind a new CDN or firewall? Set search, training and user-requested access in its bot settings on purpose; see our AI crawler guide.

These checks catch real launch defects: in our crawl, 1.6% of contractor homepages carried noindex and 1.5% of valid robots.txt files blocked the homepage for every crawler without its own rule.

Bot defaults change, too. Cloudflare's July 1, 2026 changelog says domains added from Sept. 15, 2026 get defaults that block bots it classes as training or agent on pages with ads, and it told TechCrunch that covers existing free customers too.

Keep the old host paid and a full export saved until every test passes, and agree on that overlap before notice. With the TTL down, pointing the domain back from your saved DNS zone takes hold for most visitors within a few hours.

The first four weeks after launch

If only the host changed, Google's hosting guide says you can shut the old hosting once its traffic reaches zero, and a short dip in crawl rate is normal.

If the URLs changed, old URLs should keep redirecting instead of serving old pages, and any copy left on a vendor or staging hostname is a duplicate to close once you don't need a way back.

A new domain asks the most: keep the old one registered and redirecting as long as the redirects run (Google doesn't mention renewing it, but a lapsed domain can't redirect), file a Change of Address in Search Console, and follow our rebrand workflow too.

Rankings can fluctuate for a while when URLs or the domain change, Google says, and a medium-sized site can take a few weeks or more. A two-week baseline does not control seasonality. Compare it with each of the first four weeks, number by number and form by form, and chase any line that went quiet.

For an acquisition, the reviews and AI due-diligence checklist adds ownership and review-program questions to the website handover.

If the old address ends in business.site, follow the Google website retirement guide to identify the current replacement and domain owner.

Method

Websites: 1,096 US home-service contractor websites drawn from Google's local map results, with Cheers customers removed; 976 homepages were readable as served. The listings come from Cheers' weekly scans of Google's local map results in markets where 10 Cheers home-service customers operate, so they aren't a national random sample. We set aside hospitals and urgent care, EV charging stations, utilities and city departments, stores and restaurants, businesses outside the US and sites we couldn't place.

Sample: every domain that held a top-three spot in at least half its appearances, plus random draws from the rest. Re-weighting the groups to the frame moves no contractor rate by more than 3.0 points.

Crawl: one pass from 06:57 to 07:00 UTC on Nov. 1, 2026, with a desktop Chrome user agent, reading the homepage and robots.txt only. We read raw HTML with no JavaScript run, so presence rates are floors, and we submitted no forms. CAPTCHA and scheduler figures come from a second fetch from 12:54 to 12:55 UTC the same day, which 922 of the 976 homepages answered.

Crawl detail: the form rate includes search and newsletter boxes. Of the 976 homepages, 15.8% carried code from booking or field-service software, but a scheduler or request form loaded on only 12.0% (117); the rest carried other parts of that software, such as call tracking, chat, reviews or a customer portal, or code we couldn't classify. We put no rate on chat widgets or AI receptionists, because the markers we searched for also match ordinary words. Noindex: 16 of 976 homepages. Robots.txt: 14 of 947 valid files blocked the homepage for every crawler without its own rule; we can't tell which were deliberate.

Phone numbers: the Cheers Market Baseline, our own research panel. ChatGPT answers from Oct. 2 to 31, 2026 in 100 metros (60 US, 40 Canadian). The per-answer figures count repeated numbers and compare Oct. 9 to 31 (4.53 per answer) with Oct. 2 to 8 (0.71), across all 100 metros.

Phone website check: we sampled 900 business numbers from 772 answers, 730 of them checkable against a readable business site (374 in the US), and checked those sites on Nov. 1. The US split rests on 32 of 78 numbers for sites that ran a call-tracking script and 34 of 280 for sites that didn't. Across the US and Canada together, it was 34.0% (36 of 106) against 8.5% (51 of 603). Our crawler read each page as delivered, before any script could swap the number, so on a tracking site we compared against its default number. We can't tell where the off-site numbers came from, and we didn't dial any number.

Rules and changes: Google's guides and help pages, Cloudflare's changelog and the news reports cited here were read on Nov. 1, 2026 and are mostly paraphrased. In the ad-routing report, the advertiser later told Search Engine Roundtable it was fixed on his accounts. Cloudflare also says a crawler that does both search and training gets treated as training, while search crawlers stay allowed. The Google help-center pages carry no date, so re-read them before you act on a detail.

Sources

• Managing users and permissions, Google Tag Manager Help, undated. Tag Manager account and container roles.
• About access levels in your Google Ads account, Google Ads Help, undated. Ads access levels and manager accounts.
• Registrants' Benefits and Responsibilities, ICANN, undated. Registrant responsibility for a domain.
• Add, edit, and delete Analytics users and user groups, Google Analytics Help, undated. Who can delete Analytics users.
• Transfer primary ownership of a Business Profile, Google Business Profile Help, undated. Primary ownership transfer and the 7-day wait.
• Google LSAs Showing Google Business Profile Number, Not Google Ads Number, Search Engine Roundtable, Sept. 25, 2026. Ads showing the profile number.
• What changed in ChatGPT in October: GPT-6, UTM tracking and sources, Sistrix, Oct. 30, 2026. ChatGPT's drop in tagged links.
• How to move a site, Google Search Central, updated Aug. 20, 2026. Redirect rules for moved URLs.
• Changing your hosting, Google Search Central, updated Dec. 10, 2025. TTL and shutting old hosting.
• New options to manage AI traffic, Cloudflare developer changelog, July 1, 2026. New bot defaults from Sept. 15.
• Cloudflare's new policy pushes AI companies to pay for publishers' content, TechCrunch, July 1, 2026. Defaults covering existing free customers.

Sources read November 1, 2026.

Dylan Allen-Arnegård is the CEO & Co-Founder of Cheers, the done-for-you local visibility partner for established home-service companies and PE-backed portfolios.