Redesign or migrate your website without losing rankings

Rankings belong to URLs and the content on them. When a redesign changes /services/seo-audit to /what-we-do/audit and nobody redirects the old address, Google sees a page that has disappeared and a new one with no history. Links pointing at the old URL lead nowhere, and the value they carried is wasted.

Content changes cause quieter losses. Designers often cut copy to make pages look cleaner. If the old page ranked because it answered a question thoroughly, the leaner replacement may no longer deserve its position.

Then there are technical slips: a staging site’s noindex tag carried into production, a robots.txt that blocks everything, canonical tags still pointing at the staging domain. Each is easy to fix and devastating if nobody notices for a fortnight.

Moving from WordPress to Shopify or a custom build, from .in to .com, from subfolders to subdomains, or merging two sites into one are all migrations — even when the team thinks of the project as ‘just a new website’.

Avoid changing everything at once if you can. Each change adds risk, and when several happen together it is hard to tell which one caused a problem. If the domain must change, consider keeping the URL paths identical for the first launch.

• Domain change: example.in to example.com
• Platform change: WordPress to Shopify, or a builder to a custom site
• Structure change: new URL paths or merged pages
• Protocol change: HTTP to HTTPS
• Content and design overhaul on existing URLs

Gather old URLs from several places: a crawl of the current site, your XML sitemap, the Search Console Performance and Pages reports, GA4 landing pages and a backlink tool’s most-linked pages. Each source catches URLs the others miss — old PDFs, campaign landing pages, blog posts from years ago.

Map one-to-one wherever possible. Google tends to treat a redirect to an irrelevant page, such as the homepage, much like a missing page, so the value is lost anyway. If a page genuinely has no replacement and no traffic or links, letting it return a 404 or 410 is acceptable.

Avoid redirect chains — old URL to interim URL to new URL — by pointing every old URL straight at its final destination. Google advises keeping site-move redirects in place for at least a year, and in practice there is little reason ever to remove them.

Export a baseline: organic sessions by landing page from GA4, clicks and impressions by page and query from Search Console, and rankings for your key terms. Save it with a date. Without it, a post-launch dip becomes an argument instead of an investigation.

Crawl the staging site and compare it with the old crawl. Look for missing pages, changed titles and meta descriptions, lost headings, removed structured data and internal links pointing to old URLs. Update internal links to point at new URLs directly rather than relying on redirects.

Launch in a quiet trading period — never the week before a sale or your busiest season — and make sure the developer is available for the days that follow.

On launch day, crawl the old URL list and confirm each returns a single 301 to the right destination. Submit the new XML sitemap in Search Console. If the domain changed, use the Change of Address tool in the old property, and keep both properties verified.

Watch for 404 errors on URLs you missed, pages reported as not indexed, and sharp drops on specific pages rather than across the whole site. Page-level drops usually point to a specific mapping or content problem.

Update everything outside the site that points to it: your Google Business Profile website link, ad final URLs, email signatures, social profiles and key directory listings. Every outdated link adds a redirect hop and can muddle your tracking.

Google’s documentation says a medium-sized site can take a few weeks for most pages to move in its index, and larger sites longer. Some reshuffling is normal while Google recrawls and processes the new URLs.

A sustained drop is not normal. Compare post-launch top pages with your baseline, find the pages that lost the most, and check each one: is it redirecting correctly, indexed, carrying the same content and linked internally? The cause is usually specific and findable.