Guide · Technical
Moving a site
without losing what it had.
Rankings do not disappear because a site looks different. They disappear because the addresses people and search engines were using stopped answering. Everything below exists to prevent that one failure.
Published 2026-09-24 · Formory Group
Before you touch anything: write down what you have.
Export the full list of current addresses — every page, not just the ones in the menu. Old service pages, old blog posts and old landing pages are usually where the surprise traffic lives, and they are the ones nobody remembers to carry across.
Note which of them have links from other websites pointing at them. Those are the pages where a broken address costs the most, because the link value dies with the page.
Map old to new, one by one.
Every old address needs a destination: the same page on the new site, or the closest equivalent. Sending everything to the home page is the lazy option and it throws away most of the value — search engines treat a mass redirect to the home page as a soft removal of those pages.
Where a page genuinely has no equivalent, let it return a proper 404 rather than redirecting somewhere irrelevant. An honest 404 is better than a misleading redirect.
Keep the URLs identical where you can.
The safest migration changes nothing about the addresses. If the old structure is reasonable, keep it — a tidier URL scheme is worth far less than the risk of getting the redirects wrong.
If addresses must change, change them once. Chains where an old address redirects to an interim one and then to the final one lose value at each hop and are easy to leave behind by accident.
Launch day, in order.
Put the redirects live at the same moment as the new site, not afterwards. Check a sample of twenty old addresses by hand, including the awkward ones with query strings or trailing slashes.
Then submit the new sitemap, check the indexing report for errors over the following week, and leave the old sitemap accessible for a while so the redirects get discovered rather than guessed at.
What normal looks like afterwards.
Rankings wobble for a week or two after any migration and then settle. That is expected and is not a reason to change anything.
What is not normal is a sustained drop after three weeks, or a rise in pages reported as not found. Both point back to the redirect map, which is where the problem almost always is.
Questions
The usual questions.
Will I lose rankings if I change hosting but not addresses?
No, provided the site answers as quickly as before and nothing breaks during the switch. A host move with identical URLs is a low-risk change.
How long should redirects stay in place?
Permanently, in practice. They cost nothing to keep and people link to old addresses for years.
Should I change my domain at the same time as the design?
Not unless you have to. Two large changes at once make it impossible to tell which one caused a problem.
Two minutes
Where does your
own site land?
Everything above came from opening real websites. Yours takes ten seconds: we load it the way a customer would and say what we find, including when the honest answer is that nothing needs doing.
Worth a
conversation?
No pitch deck and no discovery call. Tell us the trade and the city, and we will say what we would do and what it costs.