Moving your website to a new platform without losing rankings

Almost every migration that loses traffic loses it the same way: old URLs come back as 404 errors instead of redirecting to their new equivalent. Fix that one thing and a platform move is a routine project. Skip it and you can hand back years of accumulated search rankings in a single afternoon.

I have moved sites off Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy Website Builder, and neglected WordPress installs for 14 years now. The pattern does not change. The sites that come through clean did the boring inventory work first. The sites that crater did the design first and treated URLs as a launch-day detail.

Why do websites lose traffic after a platform migration?

There are five causes, and they account for nearly all of it.

No redirect map. The old site had /services/water-heater-repair/ and the new site has /what-we-do/plumbing/. Nobody wrote the connection down, so the old URL 404s. Every link pointing at it, from Google’s index to a directory listing to somebody’s bookmark, now goes nowhere.

Redirecting everything to the homepage. This is worse than it looks. Google treats a mass redirect to the homepage as a soft 404 and largely ignores the signal, so you get the traffic loss without the ranking transfer. One-to-one or nothing.

Content quietly disappeared. The old service page had 900 words that answered real questions. The new one has a hero image, three feature cards, and 140 words. The URL survived. The reason it ranked did not.

The staging site’s blocking rules shipped to production. WordPress has a “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” checkbox. Most staging setups add a robots.txt disallow or a site-wide noindex tag. If any of those come along at launch, you disappear from Google in a week or two and it takes another month to come back.

Analytics and Search Console never got reconnected. Not a ranking problem, but it means you cannot tell whether anything went wrong, which is how a broken migration goes unnoticed for a quarter.

What does a migration cost?

A platform move usually gets quoted as part of a redesign. Our published range for a website redesign is $2,500 to $12,000, and where a specific project lands depends far more on page count and content volume than on which platform you are leaving. A 12-page brochure site off Squarespace sits near the bottom. A 200-page nonprofit site with a decade of blog posts and a donation flow sits near the top.

If you only want the migration mechanics handled and you are building the new site yourself, that is hourly work at $95 to $150. A redirect map plus post-launch verification for a small site is typically 6 to 12 hours.

Step 1: Inventory every URL before you design anything

You cannot redirect what you have not listed. Pull URLs from four sources, because no single source is complete.

Source	What it gives you	Cost
Google Search Console, Pages report	Every URL Google knows about, indexed and not	Free
Your existing XML sitemap	Every URL the platform thinks it publishes	Free
A crawler (Screaming Frog’s free tier covers 500 URLs)	Every URL actually linked from the site, plus titles and status codes	Free for small sites; paid tier for larger crawls
Google Analytics, landing pages, last 12 months	Which URLs people actually arrive on	Free

Merge the four lists into one spreadsheet and remove duplicates. On a small business site you will usually end up with two to four times more URLs than anyone expected, because platforms generate tag pages, author pages, paginated archives, and image attachment pages nobody ever meant to publish.

Then add two columns that decide everything: sessions over the last 12 months and whether any external site links to it. Search Console’s Links report gives you the second one for free. You do not need a paid backlink tool for a site this size.

Step 2: Decide keep, merge, or retire

Now sort by sessions, descending. In my experience the top 10 to 20 URLs on a small site account for the overwhelming majority of organic traffic, and everything below that is a long tail of near-zero pages.

• Keep anything with real traffic, real external links, or real business value. Same URL if possible. If the URL must change, it gets a one-to-one redirect.
• Merge thin, overlapping pages into one better page, and redirect all the old URLs to it. Three weak pages about the same service become one strong page.
• Retire genuinely dead pages: the 2018 holiday hours post, the staff bio for someone who left in 2021, the tag archive with one item. A retired page with zero traffic and zero links can simply 404 or 410. Redirecting junk pages to unrelated destinations does nothing good.

This is also the moment to catch the pages that quietly earn you calls. A nonprofit I worked with had a plain volunteer application page that outperformed their homepage in search. It was not on anyone’s list of important pages until we sorted the spreadsheet.

What does a redirect map look like?

A redirect map is a spreadsheet with one row per old URL. That is the whole idea. Here is the format we use, trimmed to the columns that matter.

Old URL	Sessions (12 mo)	External links	Action	New URL	Status
/services.html	1,240	Yes	Keep	/services/	301
/services/aba-therapy.html	880	Yes	Keep	/services/aba-therapy/	301
/about-us/our-team.html	310	No	Merge	/about/	301
/blog/2019/05/spring-newsletter	12	No	Merge	/blog/	301
/tag/uncategorized	0	No	Retire	—	410
/contact.php	190	Yes	Keep	/contact/	301

Four rules for filling it in:

1. Use 301, not 302. A 302 is temporary and does not pass ranking signal the same way. Most platform tools default to the right one, but GoDaddy and some hosts default to 302. Check.
2. No chains. If /old-a/ redirects to /old-b/ which redirects to /new/, point /old-a/ straight at /new/. Chains slow crawling and each hop is a chance for something to break.
3. Watch trailing slashes and capitals. /Services/ and /services and /services/ are three different URLs to a web server. Pick one convention and redirect the others to it. This site uses trailing slashes everywhere for exactly that reason.
4. Include images if they rank. /wp-content/uploads/2020/photo.jpg earns image search traffic and gets hotlinked from other sites. Moving your media library without redirects breaks both.

Step 3: Protect the content on pages that already rank

If a page currently ranks for something you care about, do not redesign it and rewrite it in the same release. Carry over the page title, the H1, and the body copy essentially intact. Change the layout if you must, but the words stay.

You can improve that page later, after the migration has settled and you can attribute the effect. Changing two variables at once means that if traffic falls you will never know whether the cause was the move or the rewrite. That is the single most common self-inflicted wound in a redesign, and I go through it in more detail in the website redesign checklist.

Platform-specific traps

Each platform breaks in its own way. These are the ones that cost real time.

Leaving	Export you actually get	The trap
Wix	No true full-site export. Media downloads, blog can be pulled via RSS or a third-party importer, pages must be copied by hand	Wix’s own URL patterns like /post/ for blog entries. Very old Wix sites use hashbang (#!) URLs, and a server cannot redirect a URL fragment, so those need JavaScript handling on the new site
Squarespace	A WordPress-format XML file, one blog page at a time. Pages and text blocks come through	Products, events, album pages, index pages, and most non-text blocks do not export. Stores and event calendars are a manual rebuild
GoDaddy Website Builder	Nothing meaningful. Copy and paste, and download images individually	Because there is no export, people rebuild from scratch and never look at the old URL list. Crawl the live site before you cancel the plan, and download your media first
Old WordPress	Full export, plus database access	Legacy permalink structures. Sites still on /?p=123, /index.php/page/, or /2014/03/post-name/ need redirect rules, not just a permalink setting change. Attachment pages and category bases are the usual stragglers

Two things that apply to all four: download your media library before you cancel anything, and confirm you actually control the domain registrar. Plenty of small organizations discover during a migration that a former volunteer or a previous agency holds the domain. That is a two-week problem if you find it early and a disaster if you find it on launch day. There is a short guide to checking on whether you actually own your website.

Step 4: Launch day

The cutover itself is short. The checklist is what matters.

1. Point DNS at the new host. Set the TTL low a day beforehand so the change propagates in minutes rather than hours.
2. Verify SSL is issued and working on both www and non-www, and that one redirects to the other.
3. Remove every staging block: noindex meta tags, robots.txt disallow rules, WordPress’s search engine discouragement checkbox, and any basic-auth password on the site.
4. Test the redirect map. Not a sample. Every row. A simple script or a crawler run against the old URL list will tell you in minutes which ones return 404 or land on the wrong page.
5. Submit the new XML sitemap in Search Console, and leave the old sitemap accessible for a few weeks so Google recrawls the old URLs and finds the redirects.
6. Confirm analytics is firing on the new site, and that Search Console is verified for the new setup.
7. Test every form and phone link on a real phone. Migrations break contact forms more often than they break rankings.

Our full website launch checklist goes deeper on the non-migration items.

Step 5: What to expect in the first 60 days

A small dip in the first two to four weeks is normal. Google has to recrawl and reprocess every URL, and it does not do that all at once. Rankings wobble, some pages drop and come back, and impressions look noisy.

A sustained drop past six to eight weeks is a bug, not patience. By then Google has recrawled the important pages. If traffic is still down, go look for the cause. In order of likelihood: missing redirects, a noindex that shipped, content that got shortened on a ranking page, or a site that is now much slower than the old one. Speed matters here, and page speed problems are common after a move to a heavier theme.

What to watch weekly in Search Console: the Pages report for a rising count of “Not found (404)”, the Performance report compared to the same period last year rather than last month, and the Sitemaps report for read errors. If traffic never really recovers and you cannot find a cause, the diagnostic path in why your website is not showing up on Google covers the rest.

One clarification, because it trips people up: Search Console’s Change of Address tool applies only when you move to a different domain. Changing URL structure on the same domain is handled entirely by your redirects. There is no button for it.

When you should not do any of this

If your site has fewer than about 20 pages and gets almost no organic search traffic, most of this article does not apply to you. Write redirects for the handful of URLs that appear in your analytics, ignore the rest, and spend the money you saved on content or photography instead.

And a harder one: most platform migrations do not fix the problem people hire them to fix. If your site is not generating leads, moving from Squarespace to WordPress will not change that. The platform is rarely the constraint. Unclear service pages, no local search presence, and no phone number above the fold are the constraints, and they follow you to the new platform. If you are on Squarespace and it works, staying put and rewriting your three most important pages is often the better use of $3,000. The Squarespace versus WordPress comparison walks through when a move genuinely is worth it and when it is not.

The migrations worth paying for are the ones where the current platform blocks something specific: you cannot build the functionality you need, the site cannot be made accessible, the annual cost has crept past what a custom build would cost to maintain, or you have lost administrative access to your own site.

Getting help with a migration

We handle platform migrations as part of web design and development work for organizations around Minneapolis, Saint Paul, and the west metro, and we do redirect mapping as a standalone hourly project when a client is building the new site themselves. Either way, the URL inventory comes first.

If you are planning a move and want a second opinion on the risk before you commit, get in touch or call (612) 293-0636. Bring your current URL list if you have one. If you do not, that is the first thing we would build.