Website migration and SEO: will a new website hurt your rankings?

A website migration does not have to cost you rankings. Rankings drop after a launch when old URLs stop working, content that ranked disappears or titles and descriptions are lost. Keep the content that ranks, send every old URL to its new home with a 301 redirect, carry over titles and descriptions, and check everything after launch.

Why can a new website lose rankings?

Search engines rank pages, not whole websites. Each page has its own history: the searches it appears for, the links pointing to it and the trust it has earned. When a new site launches, three things commonly break that history:

• Old URLs return an error. A page that moved from /services/web-design to /web-design/ without a redirect looks like a page that has disappeared, and links from other sites now lead nowhere.
• Content is cut or rewritten. A shorter, more stylish page may no longer answer the question that brought visitors in.
• Titles, descriptions and headings change. These tell search engines what a page is about. Losing them can change the searches it appears for.

Each of these can be prevented.

How do you keep your rankings during a website migration?

1. List every old URL

Before anything changes, collect every URL on your current site. Use your sitemap, a crawl of the site, Google Search Console and your analytics. Include pages, posts, images and PDFs that receive visits or links. This list is your checklist for the whole move.

2. Keep the content that ranks

Check in Search Console which pages bring in visitors, and for which searches. Keep that content on the new site, or improve it. You can change the design freely, but be careful with the words that answer the question.

3. Redirect every old URL with a 301

A 301 redirect is a permanent forwarding address. It sends visitors and search engines from the old URL to the new one, and tells search engines that the page has moved for good. Map each old URL to the most relevant new page, one to one where possible. Avoid sending everything to the home page, and avoid chains of several redirects in a row.

4. Carry over titles, descriptions and structured data

Copy the SEO title and meta description of every page to its new version, unless you are deliberately improving them. Keep headings close to the originals, and keep or add structured data, the code that labels your facts for search engines.

5. Check before and after launch

Before launch, test the redirects on a staging site (a private test copy of the new site). After launch:

• Visit a sample of old URLs and confirm that each lands on the right page
• Submit the new sitemap in Google Search Console
• Watch the page indexing report in Search Console for errors and pages that are not found
• Compare visits and positions with the weeks before launch
• Update the links in your Google Business Profile, social media profiles and email signatures

Some movement in the first weeks is normal while search engines process the change. A drop that lasts usually points to a missing redirect or missing content, and both can be fixed. If you also change your domain name, use the Change of Address tool in Search Console as well.

What did we learn from moving our own website?

We moved atelierattn.com from WordPress to Astro: 119 posts and 56 pages. We listed all 232 old URLs, gave each one a new home and checked every one after launch. None were lost. We also matched the SEO title and description on every page.

The lesson: a migration is mostly careful bookkeeping. The list of URLs is the most valuable document in the project.

Is a new website a chance to improve your SEO?

Yes. A move is a good moment to make pages faster, tidy up headings, add structured data, combine thin pages into stronger ones (with redirects) and write clear answers to the questions your customers ask. A fast site that both search engines and AI assistants can read easily gives your content a better base. See how to show up in ChatGPT, and add an llms.txt file while you are at it.

If you are still deciding on a platform, read WordPress vs Astro. If you are deciding whether to refresh or rebuild, see website redesign. And if the new site adds languages, each one needs its own URLs from the start, as we explain in multilingual websites.

What we do

Atelier ATTENTION plans every website move to keep the search traffic you have earned: a full URL map, a 301 redirect for every old address, matched titles and descriptions, and checks after launch. See our WordPress to Astro service.