How to move your website without losing your Google rankings
How do I move my website without losing SEO?
Keep every URL the same where you can, and 301 redirect every one you cannot, one old address to one matching new address. Almost all lost rankings after a migration come from redirecting everything to the homepage, or from not redirecting at all.
Website migrations have a reputation for destroying rankings. They do not, particularly. Badly executed ones do, and they nearly always fail in the same single way.
The failure is this: every old URL is redirected to the new homepage. It feels tidy and it throws away every page's individual standing. A page that ranked for "emergency boiler repair Solihull" no longer exists, and the homepage does not inherit its position, because the homepage is about something else.
Avoid that one mistake and you have avoided most of the risk.
Before you touch anything, list your URLs
You cannot preserve what you have not written down.
Get the full list of current pages. Your sitemap.xml is the quick version. Google Search Console under Pages shows what is actually indexed, which is the list that matters.
Note which ones earn anything. Search Console will show impressions and clicks per page, and analytics will show visits. Usually a small number of pages account for nearly everything, and those are the ones to be careful with.
Note the inbound links. Pages that other sites link to are the most valuable and the most damaging to break.
Half an hour of this makes the rest straightforward.
Keep the same addresses wherever you can
The simplest migration is one where no URL changes at all. If the old site had /services/bathrooms, build the new one at /services/bathrooms.
This is not glamorous and it removes most of the risk in one decision. Redesigns often change URLs for no reason other than that the new system prefers a different pattern. That preference is not worth what it costs.
Map every URL that must change
Where a URL genuinely has to move, write the mapping down: one old address, one new address, matching subject.
| Old | New |
|---|---|
| /services/bathrooms | /bathroom-fitting |
| /about-us.html | /about |
| /blog/post-1 | /blog/why-x-matters |
Then implement each as a 301 redirect, which is the permanent kind. A 302 tells search engines the move is temporary and holds the standing on the old address.
Two rules that carry most of the weight. One to one, never many to one. And matching subject: send the bathrooms page to the bathrooms page, not to the services index, because a redirect to something less relevant is treated closer to a soft removal.
If a page genuinely has no equivalent, redirect it to the nearest parent rather than the homepage, and accept that some standing is lost.
Everything else that has to move with it
Easy to forget, and each one bites:
- Images, which have their own addresses and their own rankings in image search
- PDFs, price lists and brochures, often linked from elsewhere
- The robots.txt file, and above all check it does not carry over a Disallow from the staging site. Blocking your whole site on launch day is the classic
- Canonical tags, pointing at the new URLs. A canonical still aimed at the old address undoes the migration silently
- Structured data, if you had any
- Analytics and Search Console, verified for the new setup before launch
The order of operations
- Build and test the new site on a temporary address
- Block the staging site from being indexed, then remember to unblock it at launch
- Prepare the redirect map, complete, before going live
- Go live, with redirects active from the first minute
- Check a sample of old URLs immediately. Every one should land on the right page in one hop
- Submit the new sitemap in Search Console
- Watch coverage and impressions weekly for six weeks
That step-two trap has taken down more migrations than anything else on this page. A Disallow: / copied from staging is invisible to visitors and total to search engines.
What normal looks like afterwards
A dip of some weeks is normal even when everything is correct. Google has to recrawl, follow the redirects and reassociate each page.
What is not normal is a drop that persists past a month or two. That is a fault, and the first place to look is always the redirects: check for chains where one old URL bounces through two or three hops, for redirects to the homepage that should have been specific, and for anything returning a 404.
Keep the redirects for ever
Do not remove them after six months. Other people's links to your old URLs never expire, printed material lasts years, and there is no cost to leaving a redirect in place. Removing them is a self-inflicted wound with no upside.
If the move also involves a change of domain rather than just a change of platform, there is more to it, and it is covered in how to transfer a domain name.
Common questions
- Will I lose rankings when I move my website?
- There is usually a small dip for a few weeks while Google reprocesses the site, even when everything is done correctly. A lasting drop means something is wrong, and it is nearly always the redirects.
- What is a 301 redirect?
- A permanent instruction that a page has moved to a new address. It sends visitors to the right place and tells search engines to transfer the old page's standing to the new one. A 302 is temporary and does not do the same job.
- How long does recovery take?
- Typically two to six weeks for a small site with correct redirects. If you are still down after three months, the migration has a fault rather than a delay.
