Search rankings are what site owners worry about most in a migration, and rightly so. The good news is that the risks are well understood, and nearly all of them come down to preparation.
Before you start
- List every URL. Use the sitemap and a crawl, and pull your most-visited pages from analytics. Don’t rely on the menu.
- Note what’s actually used. Forms, search, bookings, stores and member areas each need a plan. Many plugins turn out to do nothing the visitor would miss.
- Record a baseline. Save your rankings, traffic and speed scores, so you can show the change afterward.
- Decide where content will live. EmDash is built for Astro and supports WordPress migration, so editors keep a real CMS.
While you build
- Keep the URLs where you can. The safest redirect is the one you don’t need.
- Bring metadata across. Titles, descriptions, canonical tags and social images.
- Carry over structured data. Rebuild any schema the old site relied on.
- Keep your images. Moving them is fine, as long as old image URLs that rank or are linked to still resolve.
Before launch
- Test every redirect. Run your whole URL list against the new site.
- Check the sitemap and
robots.txt. A leftover “noindex” from staging is a classic mistake. - Test the forms. Send a real message and confirm it arrives.
- Plan the rollback. Lower your DNS TTL ahead of time and keep the old site available.
After launch
- Submit the new sitemap in Search Console.
- Watch for 404s and add any redirects you missed.
- Compare against your baseline. A short wobble after a move is normal. Keep watching for a few weeks.
Doing this across a fleet
One migration is a project, but a whole fleet needs a process. Our host playbook covers how to choose where to start, and Fleet Modernization shows how a free rebuilt homepage opens the conversation.