How to replace a website without losing your Google rankings

The nightmare version of a website launch goes like this. The new site looks far better than the old one. Three weeks later enquiries have halved, and nobody can say exactly when it started.

Rankings are not lost because a site is new. They are lost because URLs changed and nothing told Google where they went, or because content that was carrying the rankings quietly did not make it across. Both are preventable, and the prevention is mostly clerical.

Before you change anything: write down what you have

You cannot tell whether a migration went wrong if you did not record what “right” looked like. Capture all of this while the old site is still live:

• Every URL. Crawl the site with Screaming Frog or similar and export the list. Include PDFs and images that rank.
• Your top pages by traffic and by impressions. Search Console, last 12 months, exported.
• Your ranking keywords and positions. Search Console Performance, exported. This is your before picture.
• Every page with backlinks. Those are the pages where a broken redirect costs the most.
• Current Core Web Vitals and crawl stats.

The redirect map is the whole job

For every old URL, decide where it goes. Each one gets a 301 permanent redirect to the closest equivalent page on the new site — not to the homepage.

Redirecting everything to the homepage is the most common migration mistake and Google treats it as a soft 404: the redirect is honoured for the user and the ranking signal is discarded. A redirect only passes value when the destination is genuinely about the same thing as the source.

Rules worth following

1. One hop. Old URL to final URL directly. Chains of redirects lose value and slow everything down.
2. Keep the URL if you can. The best redirect is the one you did not need.
3. Mind the trailing slash. If the new site canonicalises to a trailing slash, every redirect should land on the slashed version, or you add a second hop to every single request.
4. Do not forget the old sitemap URLs, feeds, and anything with query strings that ranked.

Content: the part people skip

A redesign is often also a rewrite, and a rewrite is where rankings quietly die. If a page ranked for a term, something on that page earned it. Cutting the page from 1,400 words to 300 because the new design looks cleaner with less text will cost you the ranking.

• Keep the headings that match search intent.
• Keep the depth on pages that rank. Design around the content, not the other way round.
• Carry over the title and meta description unless you have a reason to improve them.
• Keep internal links pointing at the same places. A page that lost half its inbound internal links will lose position.

The pre-launch checklist

Run this on the staging site before it goes anywhere near the live domain:

1. Is staging blocked from indexing? A staging site indexed by Google creates duplicate content and will outlive the project.
2. Does the live site's robots.txt allow crawling? A Disallow: / shipped from staging is the single most destructive one-line mistake in this entire process.
3. Does every page have a self-referencing canonical?
4. Does the XML sitemap list the new URLs — in their canonical form? A sitemap full of URLs that redirect is reported as “page with redirect” and those pages are not indexed as submitted.
5. Do the redirects actually work? Test every single one with a crawler, not a sample.
6. Is analytics installed and firing?
7. Is structured data present and valid?

Launch day, and the fortnight after

1. Verify the live site in Search Console if the property is new, and submit the new sitemap.
2. Check robots.txt and a handful of canonicals on the live domain immediately after the switch.
3. Request indexing for your most important pages — the homepage and your top few commercial pages.
4. Watch Crawl Stats and the Pages report daily for the first week.
5. Expect a wobble. Some movement in the first two to four weeks is normal as Google recrawls and reassigns signals. A steady decline past that is not normal and means something is wrong.

What a normal recovery looks like

On a well-executed migration of a modest site, most pages are recrawled within two to three weeks and rankings settle close to where they were. Larger sites take longer simply because crawl budget is finite.

What should not happen is a permanent drop. If traffic is still down significantly after six weeks, the usual causes are, in order: redirects missing or pointing at the homepage, content cut from pages that were ranking, a noindex left in place, or internal linking that changed so much that important pages are now hard to reach.

We went through this ourselves moving this site off WordPress, which is where most of the specifics above come from. If you are planning a replacement and would rather not learn these in production, website migration is the service, and signs you have outgrown your website covers how to tell whether you need one yet.