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7 October 2026

How to move to a new website without losing your Google rankings

“We’re getting a new website. Are we going to drop off Google?” It’s a fair worry. A new site doesn’t wreck your rankings on its own. A lot of the damage comes from changing the addresses of your pages and never telling Google where everything went. Picture a physio clinic whose sports massage page used to live at one address and now lives at another. Nobody set up a redirect. Google keeps sending people to the old one, they land on an error page, and the bookings that page used to bring in quietly stop. That’s avoidable. It just takes a plan, and the plan starts weeks before launch.

In brief

Changing a page’s address is the risky bit. A new design on the same URLs is much less risky.
List every old URL and decide where each one goes before anything goes live.
Use permanent server-side redirects and leave them in place for at least a year, ideally longer.
Expect a wobble in Google for a few weeks or more and watch Search Console while it settles.

When a new website counts as a site move

Google splits site moves into two kinds. In the first, the addresses stay exactly the same, like when you switch hosting company. Expect Googlebot to crawl a bit less straight after the switch, then pick back up over the next few days.

The second kind is the one that catches people out. That’s any move where URLs change. Going from a .com to a .co.uk counts. So does switching from HTTP to HTTPS, or a rebuild that turns /our-services/accounts-preparation.html into /services/accounts/. Lots of rebuilds land here without anyone saying so. The page structure gets tidied up and every old address stops working on launch day.

For the wider picture of how Google finds and ranks pages, our guide to how SEO works for a business website covers it. This post goes deeper on the move itself.

Change one thing at a time if you can

Google’s site move guidance has a line that’s easy to overlook. Change one thing at a time. Its example is a business moving to a new domain, changing its content management system and launching a new layout, and its advice is to do them one after another. Move the domain first. Then change the layout.

If traffic drops after launch, you’ve then got a fighting chance of working out why. Do five things on one Friday afternoon and you’re guessing. It isn’t always practical, mind. A café moving off an old website builder onto WordPress will usually get a new design, new hosting and new URLs in one go, because the old platform’s addresses often can’t come with it. Fine. Just know it’s the riskier route, and keep as many of the old URLs as you sensibly can. If the old address for a hotel’s weddings page was perfectly good, there’s no prize for changing it.

Pick a quiet spell for it if you can, which is Google’s advice too, so fewer people hit any teething problems. For a garden centre that’s probably not April. For an accountancy practice it’s certainly not January, with the self-assessment rush on.

Map every old URL before launch

This is the bit that makes or breaks it. Before the new site goes live you want a list of every address on the old one and where each should point on the new one. A spreadsheet does the job. Old URL in one column, new URL in the next.

Where do the old URLs come from? Start with the important ones and pull them from your sitemap, server logs and analytics. Search Console’s Performance report shows which pages actually get clicked in Google. Add images, videos and downloads like PDFs too, which Google calls out by name. An online shop’s product photos might be turning up in image results. A manufacturer’s spec sheets often get linked from distributors’ sites.

Then match them up. Each old page should go to its closest equivalent on the new site. The old boiler repairs page goes to the new boiler repairs page. It doesn’t go to the home page. Google is blunt about this and tells you not to send lots of old URLs to one unrelated page, naming the home page as the example. If a page really has no equivalent, because you’ve stopped offering that service, it’s fine to let it return a proper 404 or 410 error.

Getting the redirects right

Redirects tell browsers and Google that a page has moved for good. Google recommends server-side permanent redirects where possible, usually a 301. A 308 does the same job. A permanent redirect tells Google the new address is the one to show in results. A temporary one keeps the old address in results, which is the opposite of what you want from a move.

On a WordPress site, a redirect plugin or rules on the server can handle this. Either way, each redirect should go straight from old to new. Chains creep in on sites that have been rebuilt twice. Old page to newer page to current page. Keep them short, ideally no more than three hops, and better still point each old address directly at its final home.

And the old worry about redirects ‘losing link juice’? Google says plainly that 301 and other permanent redirects don’t cause a loss in PageRank. In practice, links other sites have pointed at your old pages keep counting as long as the redirect’s there. It’s still worth asking the few that matter most, like a trade body directory, to update their link.

Test before you celebrate. The URL Inspection tool in Search Console checks one address at a time, and for bigger sites a script or crawler can run through the whole spreadsheet.

The launch-day checklist

A few jobs need doing the moment the new site goes live. Miss them and the redirects won’t save you.

Remove any ‘noindex’ tags or robots.txt blocks left over from the build. It’s an easy one to miss, and it can hide the whole site from Google.
Update menus, buttons and in-text links so they point straight at the new URLs.
Give each new page a canonical tag that points at itself.
Submit the new XML sitemap in Search Console.
If the domain or subdomain has changed, use the Change of Address tool in Search Console.

The internal links job gets skipped a lot. Old blog posts are often full of links still aimed at old addresses. Our post on getting the links between your own pages working for you explains why they matter and how to check them. Page titles tend to get rewritten during a rebuild as well, so have a read of how Google treats title tags and meta descriptions before the new ones go live.

The Change of Address tool is only for moving from one domain or subdomain to another. It shouldn’t be used for a switch to HTTPS or for moving pages around within one domain. To use it you need to own both sites in Search Console and have the 301 redirects in place first. For 180 days after you start the move there, Google forwards signals from the old site to the new one and favours the new site.

What to expect after launch

Things will move about, and that’s normal. On a medium-sized site it can be a few weeks or more before the new URLs gradually replace the old ones in results. Bigger sites take longer. Google only counts a move as complete once Googlebot has visited every URL on both the old and new site at least once.

So don’t judge it on day three. Keep an eye on the Page indexing report in Search Console, where the new pages should be going in and the old ones dropping out. Compare clicks in the Performance report with the same stretch before launch. A page that used to bring in a steady trickle of enquiries and then goes quiet for good? Check its redirect first.

Keep the redirects for as long as you can. Google says generally at least a year, which gives it time to pass everything across to the new URLs. There’s rarely a good reason to take them down at all. Hang on to the old domain too if you’ve changed it. Let it lapse and someone else could register it, along with every link still pointing at it.

Getting help with a site move

None of this is hard on its own. It’s fiddly, though, and it tends to land in the busiest week of a website project. If you’re still weighing up whether your site needs a redesign, put the migration plan on the list before the design brief gets written.

Site moves sit squarely within our SEO services, and our SEO-safe site migration work covers the mapping, redirects, launch checks and the weeks of monitoring afterwards. If a new site’s on the horizon, talk to us and we’ll look at what you’ve got before anything moves.

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Sources

Scott Woodfield

Founder of TWA, Scott harbours over 10 years of digital marketing agency experience. Everything from removing a background of an image to full blown ecommerce solutions from the ground up, Scott's your go to guy for anything marketing & web.

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