How to Move Your Website Without Losing Google Rankings

A new website can look great and still wreck your search traffic if the move is handled badly. Google ranks individual page addresses, so when those addresses disappear, the rankings and the links pointing to them disappear too. The fix is not complicated, but it has to be done carefully. Here is the process I follow.

Why migrations go wrong

When a site is rebuilt, the page addresses often change. An old page at /ourteam becomes /team. A visitor or Google arriving at the old address gets an error unless something tells them where the page went. That something is a permanent redirect. Without it, the old page shows an error, Google drops it, and the ranking it built is gone.

Step 1: List every address on the old site

You need a complete list before you touch anything. Combine these sources:

• The old site's sitemap, if it has one
• A crawl of the live site using a crawler tool
• The pages report in Google Search Console, which shows what Google has indexed
• Your analytics, to catch pages that get traffic but are not linked anywhere

Do not forget older addresses that already redirect, such as pages from a previous version of the site.

Step 2: Map each old address to a new page

Build a simple table with two columns: the old address and the new address that best replaces it. Match by meaning, not by convenience. A page about a service should redirect to the page about that service. If a page has no equivalent, redirect it to the closest relevant section, not the homepage.

Where you can, keep the same addresses on the new site. The fewest redirects are the ones you never need.

Step 3: Set up permanent redirects

Use a permanent redirect, usually a 301 or the equivalent 308. A temporary redirect (302 or 307) tells Google the move is not permanent and can slow the transfer. The exact setup depends on your host. Here are three common examples.

Vercel, in vercel.json:

{
  "redirects": [
    { "source": "/ourteam", "destination": "/team", "permanent": true }
  ]
}

Apache, in .htaccess:

Redirect 301 /ourteam /team

Nginx:

location = /ourteam { return 301 /team; }

Step 4: Test every redirect, on every version of the address

This is the step people skip. Your site can be reached in four ways: http or https, with or without www. Test your redirects on all of them, not just one. When I moved a counselling practice from a Squarespace template to a custom site, I tested all 20 of their old Google-indexed addresses on both the root domain and the www version, because a redirect that works on one and fails on the other is a hole.

A quick way to test is the command line:

curl -I https://www.yourbusiness.ca/ourteam

Look for a 301 or 308 status and the correct destination in the location header, then a 200 on the destination page.

Step 5: Leave your email alone

Changing where your website lives means editing DNS records. Your email uses DNS too, specifically the MX records and often TXT records. If you change the wrong ones, your business email can stop working. Only change the records that point your website, and leave everything else untouched. On the Rise Counselling migration, the existing business email was left exactly as it was throughout the DNS changes.

Step 6: Check the technical basics on the new site

• No leftover noindex tags. Staging sites are often set to noindex. If that tag survives launch, Google will drop your pages.
• Robots file is not blocking the site.
• Canonical tags point to the right live addresses.
• A fresh sitemap lists the new addresses.
• Internal links use the new addresses, not the old ones.
• Titles, descriptions and headings carry over for pages that ranked well.

Step 7: Tell Google and watch the results

Submit the new sitemap in Google Search Console and check the coverage and crawl reports for errors over the next few weeks. Watch for new 404s, pages that fell out of the index and sudden drops in impressions. Fix problems as soon as they show up.

Common mistakes

• Redirecting everything to the homepage
• Using temporary redirects
• Forgetting the www version or the http version
• Leaving a staging noindex tag on after launch
• Changing page content so heavily that it no longer matches what ranked
• Removing redirects after a few weeks

How long do I keep the redirects?

At least a year. Google recommends it, and there is rarely a reason to remove them. They cost nothing and keep old links and bookmarks working.

Plan it before you rebuild

The time to think about this is before the new site is built, not after launch. If you are weighing a rebuild, read rebuild or cleanup: how to tell which you need, and compare platforms in WordPress vs a custom-coded website. The Rise Counselling case study shows a migration where every old address was redirected so existing search rankings could carry over. If you would like me to handle a move for you, ask for a free audit and I will look at your current site first.