Moving your website without losing SEO

Moving your website without losing SEO: the short answer

Can you move your website without losing SEO? Yes, if you prepare properly. Google doesn't remember a website, it remembers individual addresses (URLs). Over time, each address has built something up: a position in the search results, links from other sites, bookmarks from clients. If that address disappears without a redirect, you lose it.

Moving can mean all sorts of things: new hosting, a different system, a new structure or a new domain name. The more that changes at once, the more the preparation matters. The approach isn't complicated, but it does need to be precise: map all your old addresses, send each one to the best new page, keep what works and check everything after launch.

One thing upfront: nobody can guarantee your rankings. Some fluctuation for a few weeks after a move is normal. With the steps below you do keep the risk of a lasting drop as small as possible.

Step 1: map all your old addresses

Start with a complete list of everything that's online now. Not just the pages in your menu, but also the things you may have forgotten about. Good sources are:

• Your current sitemap. That's a list of your pages for search engines. On WordPress you'll often find it at /wp-sitemap.xml or /sitemap_index.xml.
• Google Search Console, Google's free tool for website owners. The Performance report shows which pages get visitors from Google, and for which search terms.
• A crawler. That's a program that walks through your whole site, such as Screaming Frog. It also finds pages that aren't in any menu.
• PDFs and images. On WordPress they live in /wp-content/uploads/. A brochure that other sites link to is just as much an address.
• Links from outside. Think of old newsletters, LinkedIn posts, mentions by partners and your Google Business Profile.

Step 2: keep what works

A new website feels like the moment to change everything. Don't do that blindly. The pages that currently bring in visitors from Google are doing something right. Check in Search Console which ones they are and which search terms they're found for.

For those pages, keep the topic, the key words and the title roughly the same. Improving is fine, cutting is risky. If you remove the words people use to find you, Google has less reason to show you.

Pages with no visitors and no links from outside can be merged or dropped. Even then, the old address gets a redirect, to the page that comes closest in content.

Step 3: a 301 redirect for every old address

A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect. When someone lands on an old address, the server automatically sends them to the new one. Google gets the signal that the page has moved for good, and carries the value it built up over to the new address.

Put all your old addresses in a table, with the new address in the column next to it. Pay attention to these points:

• One to one. Send each old address to the page that's closest in content.
• Not everything to the homepage. It looks convenient, but Google often treats it as a page that no longer exists.
• No chains. Redirect straight to the final address, not through two or three steps.
• Don't forget the PDFs. An old brochure that's gone returns an error for everyone who follows an old link.
• Watch out for variants. WordPress often creates extra addresses, such as category and tag pages, addresses with and without a trailing slash, and addresses with ?p= and a number.

Step 4: launch day

On launch day, things tend to go wrong in the small details. Go through this list:

• Remove the block from the test version. A test site is usually set to noindex, a setting that asks search engines not to include the page. If it stays in place, your new site disappears from Google.
• Submit the new sitemap in Google Search Console and in Bing Webmaster Tools.
• Moving to a new domain name as well? Then use the Change of Address tool in Search Console. It tells Google that your whole site is moving.
• Make your internal links point straight to the new addresses, not through a redirect.
• Leave your email alone. When you switch, you only change the DNS settings for the website. How that works is explained in domain names and DNS explained.

Step 5: check after launch

A move is only finished once you've checked that everything works. Test every old address on your list: does it land on the right new page in one step? Keep an eye on the Pages report in Search Console, where you'll see addresses Google can't find. And compare clicks and impressions with the period before the move.

Also update your links outside the website, such as your Google Business Profile, LinkedIn and your email signature. Leave the redirects in place for a long time. Google advises at least a year, and there's little reason to remove them after that. If you're moving to a new domain name, keep the old domain registered.

How I handle it when I redesign your website

I build websites myself, including as a replacement for an old WordPress site. When I do a website redesign, I follow the steps above. Your domain name stays with your own provider and your email keeps working as it does. Exactly what's included is set out in the quote.

One thing to know upfront: moving a lot of old content, such as a large blog archive, isn't part of a standard package. In that case I list it separately in the quote, so you know where you stand beforehand. How the rest of the process works is explained under how it works.