The fastest way to lose years of search traffic is a migration that ignores URLs. Every page that ranks today, every link from another site and every bookmark depends on an address. Change those addresses without a plan and visitors land on 404 pages while search engines quietly drop you from results.
We have moved everything from small town sites to platforms like LexisNexis LawLinks with nearly 3,000 law firm sites and the Microsoft News Center network. The same discipline protects rankings at every scale.
Step one: inventory every URL
You cannot redirect what you do not know about. We build a complete URL inventory from several sources, because no single one is complete:
- A full crawl of the live site
- The current XML sitemaps
- Search Console pages with impressions and clicks
- Analytics landing pages for the past year
- Backlink data for pages that other sites link to
- Server logs, which reveal old URLs still being requested
We rank URLs by traffic and links so the most valuable pages get the most attention.
Step two: map content, not just addresses
A redirect map is really a content map. For each old URL, we decide whether the content moves as is, is merged with another page, is rewritten or is retired. Merged pages redirect to the page that absorbs them. Retired pages redirect to the closest relevant page, not the home page; a blanket redirect to the home page is treated by search engines much like a missing page.
Step three: design clean WordPress URLs
Migrations are a chance to fix messy URLs, but every change creates a redirect. We balance cleanliness against risk. Where old URLs are already readable, we often keep them exactly, as we did for Newark's school sites in the Newark Public Schools migration. Where they contain session IDs, file extensions or numeric IDs, we move to readable WordPress permalinks.
Step four: implement 301 redirects properly
Use permanent 301 redirects, one hop from old to new. Avoid chains where one redirect points to another. For large maps, we implement redirects at the server or CDN edge for speed, with a WordPress redirect manager for editors to handle new cases. Pattern based rules cover predictable URL families, and an explicit list handles the rest. Every redirect is tested automatically before launch.
Step five: carry the metadata
Rankings depend on more than URLs. We migrate:
- Title tags and meta descriptions
- Heading structure and body content
- Canonical URLs and hreflang for multilingual sites
- Structured data such as Article, Event or Organization schema
- Open Graph and social images
- Image alt text and file names where practical
Step six: media and documents
PDFs and images often rank and get linked. They need redirects too. We rehost files in WordPress, rewrite references in content and redirect old file paths to new ones.
Step seven: launch and monitor
On launch day we submit new sitemaps, check robots.txt and noindex settings, and crawl the new site for broken links. In the weeks after, we watch Search Console coverage and crawl errors, compare traffic for top pages against the baseline and fix any missed redirects from 404 logs. Some fluctuation is normal while search engines recrawl; a sustained drop on a specific page usually points to a mapping issue we can fix quickly.
Internal links and canonical cleanup
Redirects catch visitors arriving from outside, but internal links should point directly at the new URLs. After migration we run a search and replace across all content to update internal links, so the site never sends its own visitors through a redirect. We also check canonical tags, pagination and taxonomy archives for duplicates, and decide which archive pages deserve to be indexed. Tag pages with one or two posts, for example, are often better left out of the index. Cleaning this up during a migration often improves search performance beyond where the old site was, because search engines find a tidier site with clearer signals about which pages matter.
Migration SEO checklist
- URL inventory from crawl, sitemaps, Search Console, analytics, backlinks and logs
- Content map with keep, merge, rewrite or retire for each URL
- Keep good URLs unchanged where possible
- Single hop 301 redirects, tested before launch
- Titles, descriptions, canonicals, hreflang and schema migrated
- Files and images redirected
- Post launch monitoring of 404s, coverage and top pages
- Staging blocked from indexing, production opened at launch
This list covers search. For the whole project, from content audit and user accounts to launch day, use our full WordPress migration checklist, also available as a printable PDF.
Frequently asked questions
How long should redirects stay in place?
Ideally permanently. They cost almost nothing and keep old links working for years.
Should we change our domain at the same time?
Only if necessary. Combining a domain change with a platform change adds risk, so we plan it carefully when it is required.
Do redirects slow the site?
Edge or server level redirects add negligible time, and only to visitors following old links.
Planning a move? Our platform migrations service includes full SEO preservation.
