Moving to a new website? An SEO checklist to keep your Google rankings

Moving website is one of the easiest ways for a local business to lose its enquiries from Google. Handled carefully, you can hold on to your rankings and often improve them. Handled badly, a big slice of search traffic can vanish overnight and take months to come back, which for an electrician or a removals firm means the phone simply stops ringing.

Thankfully, almost every migration that goes wrong fails for the same few reasons. This is the checklist we work through when we move a client’s site.

Which changes count as a migration?

Anything that changes a lot of your URLs or how Google understands the site. Common examples:

• Switching website builder, CMS or shop platform (for example, Magento to Shopify).
• A new domain name, including a switch from .com to .co.uk.
• Going from HTTP to HTTPS, or folding subdomains into the main site.
• A redesign that alters the page structure or the web addresses, such as a roofer adding separate pages for each of the three towns they cover.

Preparing before you launch

1. Crawl the old site. Run a crawler such as Screaming Frog and export every URL, page title, heading, canonical tag and status code.
2. Save your performance data. Download 12 months of Search Console clicks per page, GA4 landing page figures and a list of your most linked pages from a backlink tool.
3. Note your rankings. Take a snapshot of where you sit for your most valuable searches, such as “emergency plumber” plus your town.
4. Create the redirect map. A spreadsheet listing every old address down one column with its new destination alongside. Deal with pages that bring traffic, links or enquiries first.
5. Hold on to what works. Bring across strong titles, content and internal links unless you have a solid reason to change them.
6. Lock the staging site. Put it behind a password so Google cannot index the test copy.

Getting redirects right

Use permanent 301 redirects, one to one, pointing every old address at the best matching new page. Two shortcuts cause most of the damage:

If a page really has no equivalent and has no traffic or links, letting it return a 404 or 410 is fine.

Testing on the staging site

• Run a crawl of the staging site and put it side by side with the original crawl, looking for missing pages, titles and headings.
• Try out a sample of redirects, making sure your 100 busiest pages are covered if you have that many.
• Make sure canonical tags point to the new live addresses, not the staging ones.
• Check that structured data, hreflang (only if you run international sites) and XML sitemaps are in place.
• Measure mobile speed and Core Web Vitals, because a slower site can wipe out the gains of a new design.
• Confirm analytics and conversion tracking, such as call and form tracking, fire on the new templates.

What to do on launch day

1. Take off the password, and strip out any leftover “noindex” tags or robots.txt rules from staging. This is the most common launch mistake we come across.
2. Turn on the redirects and spot check a handful.
3. Send your new XML sitemap to both Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
4. Changed domain? Run Search Console’s Change of Address tool.
5. Update links you control elsewhere, such as your social profiles and your Google Business Profile website link.

What to watch after going live

Look at Search Console every day for the first fortnight, then once a week for three months. Keep an eye out for:

• Crawl errors and sudden jumps in 404 pages.
• Pages showing the status “Crawled, currently not indexed”, and pages listed under “Duplicate without user-selected canonical”.
• Falls in clicks to particular pages compared with the figures you saved.

A bit of movement in the early weeks is normal while Google works through the changes. A page that drops and has not recovered after roughly a month usually points to a redirect that is missing, content that went astray or an internal link that no longer works.

Keep redirects running for at least a year, and preferably for good. Google’s own advice is a minimum of one year.

Frequently asked questions

How long until rankings recover after a site move?

With good planning, rankings normally settle within a few weeks. A domain change or a big restructure can take two to four months, and a poorly planned move can take far longer.

Should I rewrite my content at the same time?

Ideally keep changes to a minimum. If the content, the URLs and the design all change together, it is hard to work out what caused a drop. Move the site first, then improve it.

Do 301 redirects lose ranking strength?

Google has said 301 redirects pass ranking signals. The bigger danger is redirecting to a page that is not a close match, which can still cost you rankings.

What is the mistake people make most often?

Launching while the “noindex” tag or robots.txt block from staging is still active. That instructs Google to keep the entire new site out of its index. Check for it before launch and again straight afterwards.

Sources and further reading

• Google Search Central: moving a site with URL changes
• Google Search Central: how redirects work in Google Search
• Google Search Central: understanding Core Web Vitals

Want help with this? We handle site moves from start to finish as part of our local SEO service, so talk to us before you fix a launch date. Get in touch.