Your old web addresses are what decide this
WordPress is not what holds your rankings. Each ranking sits at a web address, like yoursite.com/water-heater-repair.
Point every old address at its new page and you keep most of what you had. Miss them, and Google treats the old pages as gone, the new ones as strangers. Rankings slide after the addresses move, not after the colors change.
Google Search Central, under “Don’t worry about link credit”: “301 and other permanent redirects don’t cause a loss in PageRank.” A site owner on WebmasterWorld, tangor: “Last thing I ever change is the URI as that can lead to a start from zero, even with proper redirects… if more than a handful are done at a time.”
Two jobs here. Same domain with a new platform, or a new domain or host as well. Changing five things in one week is the other risk.
What a redirect actually is
A note left at the old address. It tells the browser and Google where the page lives now.
Two kinds. Permanent says the new address is the real one from now on, and Google keeps that one on file. Temporary says keep checking the old one. One left up by mistake costs you. Google counts 301 and 308 as permanent, 302, 303 and 307 as temporary.
Put it on the server that answers for your domain. Google: “use server side permanent redirects if technically possible”, and JavaScript redirects only “if you can’t do server-side or meta refresh redirects.” On WebmasterWorld, netmeg on plugins: “Less overhead if you put them in .htaccess. Plus that redirection plugin made a mess of one of my sites once.”
A redirect moves the address, not the words. If the new page says less, no redirect makes that up.
The checklist that decides whether traffic survives
- Write down every old address. Google says to check your sitemaps, your analytics or server logs, the “Links to your site” report in Search Console, and the WordPress list. Also “include URLs of embedded content… videos, images, JavaScript, and CSS files.” PDFs too. You do not have to redirect every old address. Redirect any that had traffic, had a link, or sat in your sitemap, and check the top 20 by hand.
- Match each old address to the one page that replaces it. Google: “Don’t redirect many old URLs to one irrelevant destination, such as the home page of the new site… might be treated as a soft 404 error.”
- Set permanent redirects on the server, one hop each. Google follows up to 10 hops but advises three or fewer, pointed at the final address.
- Keep the titles and the text. Same headline, same words.
- Publish the new sitemap and read your robots file. Then hunt the “do not show this page” tag staging sites carry. One left on hides the page.
- Do the Search Console change of address only if the domain changes. Google: “You cannot move properties at the path level, such as http://example.com/petstore/”. It expires: “After the 180 day period, Google does not recognize any relationship between the old and new sites.”
- Leave the redirects up. Google: “Keep the redirects for as long as possible, generally at least 1 year.” On a static build the list is a plain file, with no plugin to break it.
How long the dip lasts, and what nobody can promise
Google’s site move page: “a small to medium-sized website can take a few weeks for most pages to move, and larger sites take longer.” Same page: “the visibility of your content in Search may fluctuate temporarily during the move. This is normal and a site’s rankings will settle down over time.”
Owners report worse. A thread on Google’s own help forum: “Site Migration Causes Huge Drop in Rankings - 7 Months Later No Signs of Life or Smoking Guns”. On WebmasterWorld, fashezee changed file names, meta tags and the copy at once: “We were ranked well; within the TOP 5 for keywords targeted. However… we dropped to the 2nd page and some cases 3rd page.”
Some never come back. We cannot promise no movement, and anyone promising none is guessing. We do not publish client migrations, so this site is the one you can inspect in full.
Change one thing at a time. Do not rewrite the words the same week you change the platform.
How to tell a normal dip from something broken
Normal is a few positions of wobble, most pages still showing up, traffic drifting back over weeks.
Broken looks different. A not found page at an old address, which Google drops from its records. An old address landing on the homepage, not the matching page. A temporary redirect where a permanent one was meant. Three or four hops in a chain. The Search Console page count falling off a cliff while the not found list fills up.
Open your top 20 old addresses in a browser. Each should land on its matching new page. Not the homepage, not an error. Check on day one, three, seven and fourteen.
Owners hit this with redirects on: “Lost Rankings for my Blogpost after URL change (even though 301 Redirection applied)”. On our builds, Stablehand fixes breakage and Steward logs each change.
What we do when we move a site off WordPress
We build the new site as plain files with Astro, hosted on Cloudflare. No plugins, no database. We work that checklist by hand, then watch for two weeks. Every change goes in a dated log you can read, and nothing goes live until you approve it.
We do not promise your rankings hold. We will not change your words and your addresses in the same week, so new copy is a separate month. Current complete pricing is on the pricing page.
See what we build.