How to migrate from WordPress without losing your SEO

Moving off WordPress can improve speed and control, but a careless migration can wipe out years of rankings. This is the plan we follow.

1. Take inventory

• Crawl the existing site and export every URL, title, description and heading.
• Note your top pages by traffic and by links from other sites.
• Record current rankings and Core Web Vitals as a baseline.

2. Preserve URLs

If you can keep the same URL structure, do. It avoids most risk.

3. Redirect what changes

Map every old URL that changes to its closest new page with a permanent 301 redirect. Do not send everything to the home page.

4. Carry over on-page SEO

• Titles, descriptions and headings.
• Image alt text.
• Structured data. See the schema markup guide.
• Internal links and canonical tags.

5. Test on staging

Crawl the staging site, check redirects, status codes and that nothing is accidentally set to noindex. Compare against your inventory.

6. Launch and monitor

Submit the new sitemap, watch Search Console for crawl errors and keep an eye on traffic for several weeks. Fix issues quickly.

We handle migrations as part of our CMS builds. Weighing your options first? Read Next.js vs WordPress.