Can you move off WordPress without losing your Google rankings?
Yes, if every old address still leads somewhere sensible. Rankings mostly suffer in a move when pages disappear or redirects go wrong. Here's how to list every address, redirect each one, carry over what Google reads and check it all before launch, following Google's own guidance.
Yes, you can. Rankings usually suffer in a move for one of a few reasons: pages disappear, old addresses don't redirect or the new pages leave out what Google was reading on the old ones. Each is avoidable with a plan. This one follows Google's own guidance on moving a site.
Google ranks pages at addresses.
Google keeps track of pages by their web address. When a page moves and its old address doesn't point to the new one, Google sees a missing page and a new, unknown page. A permanent redirect joins the two. Google says it treats a permanent redirect as a signal that the new address should be the one it shows.
In a rebuild your domain usually stays the same. Only the addresses of individual pages change, and often most of them don't have to.
Start with every address your site has.
WordPress creates more addresses than most owners realize. Beyond your pages and posts there are category and tag archives, author pages, date archives, image attachment pages, feeds and PDFs in the uploads folder. Some of those carry links from other sites.
Build the list from several sources, because each one misses something:
- Your XML sitemap, if the site has one.
- Search Console's page indexing report, which shows what Google has indexed.
- Your analytics, sorted by landing page, for the pages people arrive on.
- A backlink report, for the pages other sites link to.
- A crawl of the live site, which follows every internal link.
Decide where each old address goes.
Keep the same address wherever you can. If /projects/harbor-bridge can stay /projects/harbor-bridge, that's the safest redirect of all, because there isn't one. Where an address has to change, point it at the page that replaces it. Google warns against sending lots of old pages to one unrelated page such as the home page.
| Old WordPress address | New address | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| /projects/harbor-bridge/ | /projects/harbor-bridge | Keep it, and redirect the version with the trailing slash |
| /?p=412 | /projects/harbor-bridge | Redirect to the page it showed |
| /category/marine/ | /sectors/marine | Redirect to the matching sector page |
| /tag/bridges/ | /projects | Redirect to the closest useful page |
| /author/jsmith/ | /about | Redirect, or let it go if nothing links to it |
| /wp-content/uploads/2019/03/capability-statement.pdf | /downloads/capability-statement.pdf | Redirect every PDF that has links pointing to it |
Use permanent redirects and keep them.
Google recommends server-side permanent redirects, a 301 or a 308, and says to keep them for as long as possible, generally at least a year. We keep them for good. Next.js, which we build on, sends a 308 for a permanent redirect, one of the two codes Google treats as permanent.
We point each old address straight at its new page in one step. An old address that redirects to another old address before reaching the new one just adds delay and room for error.
Carry over what Google reads on each page.
A redirect only moves the address. Google also reads what's on the page. For each important page, bring across:
- The page title and the search description.
- The main heading and the body text, especially the parts that name your services and locations.
- Image descriptions.
- Structured data, the labels that tell search engines what your business is.
- Internal links between related pages.
Rewriting can come later. On launch day, the pages that rank should say much the same as they did.
Test everything on a preview first.
Before launch we crawl the new site on its private preview, which search engines are told not to index. We check that every old address on the list reaches the right page in one redirect, that no important page is missing and that titles and descriptions came across.
Launch day and the weeks after.
- Submit the new sitemap in Search Console.
- Watch the page indexing and performance reports for drops on specific pages.
- Fix any old address that shows up as not found.
Expect some movement. Google says rankings can fluctuate during a move, and that for a medium-sized site it can take a few weeks for the new addresses to replace the old ones in results.
What we check on every move.
- A full address list built from at least four sources.
- A redirect for every address that has visits or links.
- Titles, descriptions, headings and structured data carried over.
- A crawl of the preview before launch and of the live site after it.
- Search Console watched closely for the first weeks.
Mistakes that cost rankings.
- Launching with the test site's "don't index" setting still switched on.
- Redirecting whole sections to the home page to save time.
- Dropping old pages that other sites link to.
- Forgetting the versions of each address with and without the trailing slash.
- Rewriting every title and page at the same time as the move, so nobody can tell which change caused a drop.
- Losing the PDFs and images that brought in visitors of their own.
If rankings dip after launch.
Some movement in the first weeks is normal. If a page that used to bring in inquiries drops and stays down, check three things in order. Does its old address still reach the new page in one step? Did the title, heading and text come across? Is the new page in Google's index yet, according to the URL inspection tool in Search Console? Each of those is quick to fix once you've found it.
A move is only worth making if the new site is better, so weigh that first in WordPress or a modern stack. AI tools now make the address list and the redirect map much quicker to build, as we explain in how AI tools change the cost of a rebuild. For the whole process, see how we rebuild legacy websites or book a call.