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Moving to a new website without losing your Google rankings

Rankings rarely fall after a new website because of bad luck. They fall because the old addresses were left to die. Here’s how to move safely.

By Barrie MoranFounder

Published 8 October 2026

3 min read

Nearly every business gets a new website eventually. And a lot of them see their Google traffic fall off a cliff a few weeks later, just when the shiny new site should be paying for itself.

It’s rarely bad luck, and it’s almost never Google “punishing” the new design. It’s usually one thing: the old website’s addresses were left to die. Here’s how to move without losing what you’ve built, from a team that has done it many times, and got it wrong on our own site first.

Why rankings drop after a new website

Google doesn’t rank “your website”. It ranks individual pages, at individual addresses. Years of history, links from other sites and visitor behaviour all belong to those specific URLs.

A new website almost always changes the addresses: /our-services/plumbing/ becomes /services/plumbing, a blog moves under /news/, pages get merged. If the old addresses just return “page not found”, Google gradually drops them, and everything they’d earned goes with them. The new pages start from nothing.

The rule: every old address goes somewhere

Every old URL that has traffic, links or search history needs a permanent redirect to its closest new equivalent. Not all to the home page: to the page that answers the same question.

  • One hop. Old address straight to new address. Chains of redirects (old to older to new) leak value and slow everything down.
  • The closest match, not the home page. Sending everything to the home page is treated much like a missing page.
  • Things that genuinely no longer exist should say so clearly (“gone”), rather than redirecting somewhere irrelevant.

When we rebuilt a client’s 1,470-page site this year, every one of its 1,478 old addresses was accounted for before the switch: redirected, kept, or retired on purpose.

What we got wrong on our own site

We rebuilt purpleimp.com in September 2026. We had a redirect map. We still missed things, and our own Search Console showed us:

  • Google was still reading our old sitemap, which no longer existed, so it had an out-of-date picture of the site.
  • A handful of old service addresses were caught by a new page pattern and returned “not found” instead of redirecting.
  • Every page answered at two addresses, with and without a trailing slash, so Google saw duplicates.
  • Spam links to addresses that had never existed were getting a friendly error page instead of a clear “gone”.

None of it was dramatic. All of it was fixable in a day once we looked. The lesson is that a redirect map isn’t the end of the job. Checking what Google actually sees is.

The migration checklist

Before launch

  1. List every old URL that matters. Export them from Google Search Console (pages with impressions or clicks), your analytics and your sitemap. Don’t forget old blog posts: they often carry more search history than the service pages.
  2. Map each one to its new home, or mark it as retired.
  3. Keep what’s working. If a page ranks well, keep its content and, where you can, its address.
  4. Test the redirects on the new site before it goes live, not after.

At launch

  1. Make sure the new site is allowed to be indexed. A “don’t index” setting left on from the test site is more common than you’d think.
  2. Pick one version of every address (www or not, trailing slash or not) and redirect the others to it.
  3. Submit the new sitemap in Search Console and remove the old one.
  4. Tell Bing too. Bing Webmaster Tools can import your Search Console setup in minutes, and IndexNow can tell it about changes the moment they happen.

The weeks after

  1. Watch Search Console’s page indexing report weekly for “not found” pages and anything unexpected.
  2. Request indexing for your most important pages.
  3. Expect a short wobble. A little movement for a few weeks is normal. A steady fall isn’t, and it means something was missed.

Planning a new website? Build the migration into the plan from day one. It’s part of every site our web design team builds, and our website migrations service covers it if someone else is building it. Talk to us before you switch. It’s much easier than fixing it afterwards.

Got a problem like this? Good. We like those.

Tell us what you’re dealing with and we’ll tell you honestly what we’d do.

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