Moving a WordPress site without breaking your search rankings

Most ranking losses after a move are self-inflicted and preventable. The technical work is not difficult; skipping one step is what does the damage.

Before you touch anything

• Export a full list of your current URLs. A crawl with Screaming Frog, or the sitemap, or both.
• Record current rankings and traffic for your top 30 pages. Without a baseline you cannot tell recovery from decline.
• Take a full backup — files and database — and confirm you can restore it somewhere.

If only the host changes

The URLs stay identical, so this is mostly a technical exercise. Copy files and database, test on the new server using a hosts-file override, check SSL is issued before you switch DNS, then lower the DNS TTL a day ahead so the change propagates quickly. Keep the old server running for a week.

If the design changes but URLs do not

The risk is content, not routing. Rankings drop when a redesign quietly deletes text. If a page ranked with 900 words and the new design has room for 200, you will lose it. Keep the substance, even if it moves further down the page. Also keep the H1s and the internal links.

If URLs change

This is where care is needed.

• Map every old URL to the closest matching new one. One by one. A blanket redirect to the homepage is treated as a soft 404 and loses everything.
• Use 301, not 302. A temporary redirect passes no ranking signal.
• Do not chain redirects. Old → new, directly.
• Update internal links to point at the new URLs rather than relying on redirects.
• Keep the redirects forever. They cost nothing.

Immediately after launch

Check that robots.txt is not blocking everything — WordPress has a "discourage search engines" checkbox that has ruined many launches. Confirm no noindex is left on. Resubmit the sitemap in Search Console. Crawl the site and fix every 404. Watch the coverage report for two weeks.

What normal looks like

A dip for one to three weeks, then recovery. If you are still down after six weeks, something is technically wrong — usually a redirect that was missed or a page whose content was cut in half.