Moving a website without losing your search rankings

Every redesign changes URLs. A product page moves under a new category, the blog drops dates from its permalinks, or the whole site moves to a new domain. Each old URL that now returns a 404 is a lost visitor and a lost ranking signal.

Start with a full list of old URLs

• Export every URL in the current sitemap.
• Pull the top landing pages from analytics and Search Console.
• Crawl the live site to catch pages missing from the sitemap.
• Don’t forget PDFs, images and old campaign links.

Map one to one, not everything to the homepage

Each old URL should point to its closest new equivalent with a permanent 301 redirect. Sending everything to the homepage is treated much like a 404 by search engines, and visitors don’t like it either.

Put redirects at the server when you can

Redirect plugins work, but redirects in the web server run before WordPress even loads. For a whole-domain move, one server block handles every path:

# nginx: send every path on the old domain to the new one
server {
    listen 443 ssl;
    server_name old-domain.com www.old-domain.com;
    # ssl_certificate lines for the old domain go here
    return 301 https://new-domain.com$request_uri;
}

Test before and after launch

• Run the old URL list through a checker: every one should return a single 301 to a page that loads.
• Watch for redirect chains and loops.
• Update internal links so they don’t depend on redirects.
• Submit the new sitemap and watch Search Console for 404s for a few weeks.