How to migrate your website without losing your Google rankings

You’re about to switch platforms, redesign your site, or move your store to your own domain. The change itself isn’t the problem — it’s that if your page URLs change and Google isn’t told clearly, you can lose in a few weeks the traffic it took you years to earn. Google doesn’t know your new page is “the same” as the old one unless you spell it out.

What happens when you migrate without a plan

Per Google’s official site move guide, some ranking fluctuation is normal while Google recrawls and reindexes your site, even with a well-executed migration. What isn’t normal, and is avoidable, is losing entire pages because nobody set up a redirect and they now return a “page not found,” or your new pages taking months to show up because Google never found the link between the old URL and the new one.

An unplanned migration stacks both problems: you lose what was already indexed, and the new pages take longer to rank. With a URL inventory, correct redirects and follow-up in Search Console, the damage shrinks down to the normal fluctuation Google itself describes.

Before you move anything: build a URL inventory

You can’t redirect what you don’t know exists. Before touching anything:

• Pull the full list of your current URLs. Your site’s XML sitemap usually has all of them; if one doesn’t exist or you don’t trust it’s complete, the Pages report in Google Search Console shows what Google actually has indexed.
• Prioritize by traffic and indexing status, not by how many pages you have. A product page with steady visits matters more than a terms-and-conditions page nobody reads.
• Build an old-URL-to-new-URL table. For example, a clothing store switching platforms needs a new URL assigned to every product page and every category — not just the homepage.

This inventory is the working document for the whole migration; without it, everything else turns into guesswork.

301 redirects: the piece you can’t skip

A 301 redirect tells browsers and search engines that a page moved permanently to a different address. It’s the centerpiece of any migration: per Google’s guide on redirects, permanent redirects like the 301 don’t cause a loss in the value of links pointing to that page.

For redirects to actually work:

• Every old URL points to its closest new equivalent, using your inventory table. Redirecting everything to the homepage is the most common mistake, and the one that costs the most traffic.
• Avoid redirect chains (old URL → intermediate URL → final URL): besides being slower, they make it harder for Google to follow the full trail.
• Test them before announcing the migration — visit every priority URL on your list and confirm it lands on the right page, not a 404 or a generic redirect.

If your migration is just a redesign with no domain or URL structure change, you may not need redirects at all; but any change of domain, subdomain, or how your addresses are built does.

Search Console: before, during and after

Google Search Console is where you confirm the message got through. Three moments matter:

1. Before: verify your new site as a separate property (don’t replace the old one), and upload the updated sitemap with the new URLs as soon as they’re ready.
2. During: if the change is a full domain move (say, from a free subdomain to your own .com or .mx), use the Change of Address tool from the old property; it’s built specifically to declare that relationship between the old site and the new one, and it’s meant to be used after redirects are already working, not before.
3. After: check the Pages report (formerly “Coverage”) for crawl errors on the new URLs, and use the URL Inspection tool to confirm Google is seeing the right version of your most important pages.

Keep the old site’s property active in Search Console throughout the migration — that’s where you’ll see if anything was left without a redirect.

What to check the first week

1. Go through your priority URL list, one by one. Confirm every redirect lands on the right page, not an error or a loop.
2. Check the Pages report in Search Console on the new property, looking for URLs with errors that should be indexed.
3. Look for internal links still pointing to old URLs (menus, footer, blog posts) and update them so they don’t depend on the redirect.
4. Compare the week’s traffic against your normal average, not against the previous day — the first few days’ fluctuation is expected, per Google’s own guide.
5. Don’t cancel the old hosting or domain yet. Redirects need the old address to keep responding; shutting down the old site too soon breaks everything you just set up.

A migration doesn’t go well just because you meant well — it goes well when every URL that already had traffic lands on the right destination. If you’re about to switch platforms, domains or URL structure and want the inventory, the redirects and the Search Console follow-up handled properly from the start, our migration service covers that part. And if you’re still deciding whether to leave a site builder like Wix or Tiendanube, check when it’s worth migrating first.