Moving off WordPress without losing your SEO

Will you lose rankings when you leave WordPress?

Not if the move is done properly. Search engines rank pages, not platforms. If the same content answers the same questions at the same address, or at a new address with a permanent redirect, the rankings follow it.

Some movement is normal. Google's own guide says to expect temporary ranking fluctuation during a move, and that for a medium-sized site it can take a few weeks or more before the new URLs show up in results (Google Search Central, August 2026).

Real losses come from a short list of mistakes:

• Old URLs that return 404 instead of redirecting.
• Many old URLs redirected to the home page. Google may treat those as soft 404 errors (same source).
• Pages that ranked, dropped because "nobody reads the old blog".
• Titles and meta descriptions lost in the import.
• A staging noindex tag left on at launch.

Every one of them is avoidable with a list and a test.

What do you need to list before the move?

Every URL that exists, and which of them earn traffic. Pull them from your XML sitemap, the Performance report in Google Search Console, and the landing pages in your analytics for the last 12 months. Add your strongest backlinks if you have an SEO tool.

WordPress creates more URLs than most teams know about. It offers several permalink formats, from plain post IDs to dates and post names (WordPress.org, June 2025), so two WordPress sites rarely look the same. Here's what we look for and what we usually do with each.

Your data decides each row. A tag page with steady search traffic stays. One without it goes.

How should the redirects work?

One old URL, one new URL, permanent and server-side. Google recommends permanent server-side redirects, 301 or 308, and reads them as a signal that the new page should replace the old one in results (Google Search Central, April 2026).

The rules we follow on every move:

• Redirect to the closest match. An old post goes to the same post, a service page to the same service. Not to the home page.
• No chains. Old URL to final URL in one hop, even if the old site already had redirects of its own.
• Let dead pages go. If a page had no traffic, no links and no replacement, a 404 is the honest answer.
• Test every row. We run the full list of old URLs against the new site on launch day and fix anything that doesn't land on a live page.
• Keep them. Google says to keep redirects as long as possible, generally at least a year. We leave them in for good.

On Webflow, the redirects live in the site settings. On Astro, they live in the host's configuration, next to the code. Either way, they're part of the build, not an afterthought.

What else has to move with the content?

Everything a search engine reads on the page, not only the words you see:

• Titles, meta descriptions and H1s, page by page.
• Structured data: articles, FAQs, your organisation, products.
• Image alt text.
• A self-referencing canonical tag on every new page, and updated hreflang if you have several languages (Google Search Central).
• Internal links that point at the new URLs, not at redirects.
• A new XML sitemap, and a robots.txt that doesn't block anything you want found.
• Forms, tracking and integrations: CRM, newsletter, booking.

The same Google guide gives one more piece of advice: change one thing at a time. A new platform, new URLs, new copy and a new design at once make it hard to tell what caused a dip. If you want the redesign and the move together, we keep the URLs and the core content stable at launch and rewrite in the weeks after.

What do you check after launch?

The first 30 days tell you how the move went. Our checklist:

1. Remove the staging noindex and check robots.txt.
2. Submit the new sitemap in Google Search Console.
3. Check your top pages with the URL Inspection tool.
4. Run the old URL list again: every row should answer 301, then 200.
5. Watch 404 errors and the Pages report every few days.
6. Compare clicks per page with the same weeks before the move.
7. Update the links you control: Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, email signatures, ad campaigns.

If you keep your domain, you don't need Google's Change of Address tool. It's only for moving to a new domain or subdomain (Google Search Central).

What does a WordPress migration cost?

In our calculator, moving from WordPress adds €600 on top of design and build. It covers the URL inventory, the content import and the redirect map. Keeping the same design costs about half of a new build.

A blog with more than 100 posts? The calculator flags it for a call, because a big blog needs a content plan before a price. Every quote is fixed and arrives within about 3 working days. After launch, we watch indexing and 404 errors for 30 days and fix anything that slips.

What we'd do

If WordPress works for you, stay and keep it updated. If you move, treat it as a search project first and a design project second. We'd start from your Search Console data, keep every URL that earns traffic, redirect the rest one by one, and watch the numbers for 30 days after launch.

See how our migration service works, or put your site into the calculator and tick "Move to a new platform". Still choosing where to go? Read Webflow vs WordPress.