How to move a website without losing your rankings

Why sites lose traffic when they move

Google ranks pages, not businesses. When a redesign, a new platform (leaving Wix, Squarespace or GoDaddy's builder, for example) or a new domain changes your page addresses, every link and every ranking points to an address that no longer exists, unless you tell Google where each page went.

Step 1: List every URL you have now

Gather your current addresses from three places: your XML sitemap, a crawl of the site (tools such as Screaming Frog crawl up to 500 URLs free), and Google Search Console's Pages and Performance reports, which show the pages people actually find. Note which pages bring traffic and which have links from other sites.

Step 2: Map each old page to its new home

Make a two-column sheet: old URL, new URL. Every page that matters gets its closest new equivalent, not just the home page. Sending everything to the home page throws away what each page had earned.

Step 3: Set 301 redirects

A 301 redirect tells browsers and Google a page has moved for good. Set one for every row of your map, from the old address straight to the final new one in a single hop: chains of redirects lose value and slow things down. How you set them depends on the platform: .htaccess rules on Apache hosting, a redirect plugin on WordPress, or the platform's own redirect settings.

Step 4: Keep what ranks

On the pages that bring traffic, keep the title, the main heading and the content close to what they were. A move is the wrong time for a full rewrite: change one thing at a time so you can tell what helped or hurt.

Step 5: Launch, then tell Google

Check that the new site isn't blocking search engines (a leftover "noindex" or a robots.txt that disallows everything is a classic launch-day mistake). Submit the new sitemap in Search Console. If the domain itself changed, use Search Console's Change of Address tool on the old property.

Step 6: Watch for weeks

Check Search Console for 404 errors and fix each with a redirect, compare traffic to the same weeks before the move, and keep the old domain renewed, with its redirects running, for at least a year.

Should you do this yourself?

For a ten-page site moving to the same addresses, it's manageable. Once there are dozens of pages, a platform change that rewrites every URL, or a domain change, the redirect map is meticulous work, and mistakes show up only weeks later, as lost traffic.

Written by Geek Patch. Last reviewed 2026-11-06.