Moving from WordPress to a new platform without losing your search rankings

A website migration is one of the few moments when a business can lose years of search visibility in a day. The new platform is almost never the cause. The causes are ordinary: page addresses that changed, pages that were not carried over, titles and descriptions that were rewritten for no reason, and nobody comparing the old site with the new one before switching. This is the plan we follow.

1. Take an inventory before you touch anything

List every public address on the old site: pages, posts, categories, tags, and any file other sites link to (PDFs, images). Three sources together give a reliable list: the XML sitemap, the database (WordPress keeps its content in its own tables), and Google Search Console's report of the pages that actually receive impressions.

For each address record the title, the description and the main heading. Mark the ones that get traffic or have links from other sites. Those matter most, and together they are your definition of "nothing lost".

2. Keep the addresses

The best redirect is the one you never need. If a page lived at /about-us, give it the same address on the new site. WordPress often serves posts from the root of the site and adds a trailing slash. Decide how the new site treats that, redirect the other form to it permanently, and stay consistent everywhere: links, canonical tags and the sitemap.

3. Redirect what must change

When an address has to change, send a permanent redirect (301 or 308) from the old address to the most relevant new page. Three rules:

• One hop. A redirect that leads to another redirect wastes time and can be dropped.
• Point to a page about the same thing. Sending hundreds of old pages to the home page can be treated as an error rather than a move.
• Keep the redirects for at least a year, and longer for pages that still have links pointing at them.

4. Carry over what search engines read

A redesign is not a reason to rewrite every title. Carry over titles, meta descriptions, headings, canonical addresses, image text, structured data and internal links. Improve them deliberately afterwards, one change at a time, so you can tell what helped.

5. Compare old and new automatically

Do not rely on clicking through the new site. Write a small script that requests every address in the inventory on both sites and compares the status code, the title and the final address after redirects. Anything that differs is listed for a person to judge. In one migration we kept every existing page address and ran this comparison before the switch. Checking even a few dozen pages by hand would not have been reliable.

6. Test on a separate address with search engines blocked

Deploy first to a sub-domain, and make it tell search engines to stay away: a robots.txt that disallows everything and a noindex tag on every page. A test copy that search engines can see competes with your live site. Only the real site should ever be allowed to be indexed.

7. Switch, keep the way back, then watch

Leave the old site untouched until the new one has proved itself: it is your rollback. After the switch, submit the new sitemap in Google Search Console and watch the indexing and crawl-error reports for the first weeks. Some movement in rankings is normal after any migration. A careful migration usually settles, but nobody can honestly promise that nothing will move.

A short checklist

1. An inventory of every address, with traffic noted.
2. The same addresses wherever possible.
3. One-hop permanent redirects for the rest.
4. Titles, descriptions, headings and structured data carried over.
5. An automated old-versus-new comparison.
6. A test copy that is blocked from search engines.
7. The old site kept as the rollback, the sitemap submitted, the reports watched.