Moving to a New Website Without Losing Google Rankings

Export every URL that has value

Start before anyone designs anything. Export three lists: pages with clicks in the last twelve months from Google Search Console, pages with inbound links from its Links report, and every URL from a crawl of the current site. Merge them in a spreadsheet and remove duplicates. You now know which addresses carry value and which are dead weight. Old blog posts often surprise people here: a single old guide can bring more visitors than the services pages, and it would be the first thing lost in a redesign that only rebuilds the menu.

Map old URLs to new ones

Add a column to the spreadsheet with the destination on the new site. The rule is one old page to one new page with the same purpose. Where the new site merges several old pages, redirect each to the merged page. Where a page has no successor and had no value, let it return a 404 or 410 rather than sending it to the homepage; Google treats a redirect to an unrelated page as a soft 404 anyway. Decide the map before build, because it also shows which pages are worth rewriting and which content must be carried over intact.

301 redirects done properly

A 301 tells Google the move is permanent and passes the old page's signals to the new one. Getting it right mostly means avoiding four mistakes.

• Use 301, not 302. A 302 says temporary, and Google may keep indexing the old address.
• Redirect directly to the final URL. Chains such as old page to old homepage to new homepage to new page lose signal and slow the crawl.
• Redirect the exact variant: with and without trailing slash, http and https, www and bare domain should all land in one hop.
• Keep the redirects live for at least a year, preferably permanently. Old links in emails, directories and other websites do not update themselves.

Where the redirects live depends on the platform: a rules file on the server, a redirect table in the CMS, or the hosting provider's configuration. Ask for them as a file you can read, not as something clicked together that only the agency can see. This is one of the things we check in a performance and SEO optimisation of a freshly launched site.

Launch-week checks in Search Console

Once the new site is live, verify it in Search Console under the same property if the domain is unchanged, or use the Change of Address tool if the domain moved. Then run a short routine every day for the first week.

1. Submit the new XML sitemap and confirm that the old one no longer lists removed pages.
2. Open the Pages report and check that the indexed count is not collapsing and that new URLs are being discovered.
3. Test twenty redirects from your spreadsheet by hand, including the ones with the most inbound links.
4. Search for your brand name and your three most valuable service terms and confirm that the results point at new URLs.
5. Run a speed check on the new pages; a slower site can lose ground even with perfect redirects, which is where Core Web Vitals come in.

What a temporary dip looks like

Even a perfect migration produces some movement, because Google has to recrawl and re-evaluate every page. A normal dip is small, lasts a few weeks, and recovers on its own as the new URLs replace the old in the index. A problem dip is different: traffic falls to a fraction, specific pages disappear from results, and Search Console shows a spike in errors. If that happens, the cause is almost always the mapping, the redirect implementation, or a noindex tag left over from the staging site, in that order of likelihood.

When you do not need this: if your current site gets almost no search traffic and has no meaningful inbound links, there is nothing to protect, and you can launch the new structure freely. Likewise, a new site that keeps every URL identical needs only the launch-week checks. The full method is for sites whose search traffic is worth real money, which you can see in Search Console before deciding. If the numbers make you nervous, book a short call and we will look at them with you.

Frequently asked questions