Rankings attach to URLs, not to the software behind them. The list to build before you touch anything, the things everyone forgets, and whether you should move at all.
Key Takeaways
- Rankings attach to URLs, not to the software behind them.
- The list to build before you touch anything, the things everyone forgets, and whether you should move at all.
The short answer
Rankings are attached to URLs, not to the software behind them. If every old URL either survives unchanged or redirects permanently to its closest equivalent, you keep what you have earned. If URLs change silently, you lose it, and recovery takes months.
Everything else in a migration is routine. This one thing is where sites get hurt.
Do this before you touch anything
Export a complete list of every URL the old site has: from the sitemap, from Search Console, and from your analytics. Together, not just one, because each misses things the others catch. Then note which ones actually get traffic or have links pointing at them.
That list is the contract for the migration. Every URL on it must resolve to something sensible afterwards. Produce it first, because afterwards you cannot reconstruct what used to exist.
Also take a full backup of the database and the uploads directory, and confirm it restores somewhere else. A migration is exactly the moment to discover your backups are theoretical.
Keep the URLs if you possibly can
The cheapest migration is one where /services/web-design stays /services/web-design. Resist the urge to tidy the structure at the same time as changing the platform. Two risky changes at once means that when traffic drops you cannot tell which caused it.
If you must change them, map old to new explicitly, one by one, for everything with traffic or links. A blanket redirect of everything to the homepage is the worst option available: search engines treat it as a soft 404 and you lose the lot.
The things that get forgotten
- Images and PDFs. They have URLs too, they are often linked from elsewhere, and /wp-content/uploads/ paths disappear when WordPress does.
- Feeds. /feed and /rss are subscribed to by things you cannot see.
- Trailing slashes. Pick one convention and redirect the other, or you have two URLs for every page.
- Uppercase and query-string variants. Old links in the wild will not match your new tidy format.
- robots.txt and the sitemap. A staging site's robots.txt going live with a blanket disallow is a classic and catastrophic migration error.
Launch day and the fortnight after
Test the redirects before you cut over, against the full list, not a sample. A script that checks every old URL returns 200 or 301 and lands somewhere sensible takes an hour to write and finds the ones you missed.
After launch, submit the new sitemap, watch Search Console coverage daily for two weeks, and expect some turbulence. A modest dip that recovers within a few weeks is normal. A dip that keeps going is a redirect problem, and the sooner you look the cheaper it is.
Keep the old site accessible somewhere private for a month. You will want to check what a page used to say.
Is leaving WordPress even the right call?
Sometimes not. If the problem is speed, a bloated theme and fifteen plugins can often be fixed in place for far less than a rebuild. If the problem is that every change needs a developer, or that the plugin stack is a security liability, or that the thing you are building is an application rather than a site, then moving makes sense.
We wrote about that choice in Next.js versus WordPress. Migrate because the platform is wrong for what you are doing, not because it is old.
Frequently asked questions
Will I lose rankings moving off WordPress?
Not if the URLs survive or redirect properly. Rankings follow URLs. The platform is invisible to search engines.
How long does recovery take if it goes wrong?
Weeks to months, and some of it may not come back. That asymmetry is why the URL list is worth the day it takes to produce.
Should I change my URL structure at the same time?
No. Change platform first, let it settle, change structure later if you still want to. One variable at a time.
What about my old blog posts?
Bring them. They are usually the pages with links and traffic. Dropping the archive is the most common unforced error in these projects.
Do I need to tell Google?
Submit the new sitemap and, if the domain is changing, use the change of address tool. Correct redirects do most of the work on their own.
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Written by
Antbytelabs
Writing about the software we build at Antbytelabs in Bhaktapur, Nepal.