Skip to content

Learn

How do I move my website without losing my rankings?

Point every old page at the new page that replaces it, one for one, and keep the words on those pages close to what they were. Then tell Search Console if the web address itself is changing. Google publishes a guide for this and those are its steps. Expect a wobble for a few weeks even when it goes right.

Make the list before anything moves

Get every address on the current site, from the sitemap and from Search Console, and put it in a spreadsheet. Beside each one, write the address it becomes on the new site. That spreadsheet is the whole job, and everything that goes wrong later is a row nobody filled in.

Pay attention to the pages that already bring visitors. Search Console tells you which ones those are. Those rows are the ones worth checking twice.

Redirect one for one

Each old address sends visitors and search engines to the page that replaces it: the town page to the new town page, the service page to the new service page. Done that way, the history that address built up follows it across.

The move that goes wrong sends everything to the home page. Google reads that as the old page being gone rather than moved, the history stops there, and forty pages of history become one line of nothing.

Leave the redirects up permanently. They cost nothing to keep and something is always still pointing at an old address years later.

Keep the words

Move the pages before you rewrite them. If the address changes and the content changes on the same day and something drops, you can't tell which one did it, and you'll spend a month guessing.

Get the move settled first, watch for a few weeks, then improve the pages. It's slower and it's the version where you know what happened.

Tell Google, then watch

If the web address itself is changing, use the change of address tool in Search Console. If only the pages are moving inside the same address, the redirects do the talking and there's no tool to press.

Then watch the page indexing report and your visits for a few weeks. A dip is normal while Google reprocesses a few hundred pages. A dip that keeps going usually traces back to a row in that spreadsheet nobody filled in.

One customer's before and after

A concrete coating company

River Falls, Wisconsin. Same 81 days before and after we rebuilt their site.

more often on Google
3,864 to 22,885
5.9x
more visits from Google
106 to 284
2.7x
Towns they show up in
Wisconsin and Minnesota
27

What this means for you

Before anybody touches anything, export your list of pages from Search Console and save it somewhere outside the old site. That list is the thing you can't recreate once the old site is gone, and it's what every redirect gets checked against afterward.

Bindingstone handles the move as part of the build, so every old page lands on the one that replaces it and the history you already built comes with you.

Ready to show up in every town you work in?

Your site can be live in about ten days. After that, the towns you drive to can find you.