Changing your website without losing your rankings: the migration checklist.

Short answer: list every old URL, map each one to its new equivalent, keep the page titles and the copy that were ranking, redirect everything on launch day, resubmit the sitemap, and watch Search Console for six weeks. Skip the redirects and you start from zero.

Before the build starts

• Export every URL. From the old sitemap, from Search Console’s Pages report, and from a crawl of the live site. Old blog posts, PDFs and images included.
• Note what is ranking. In Search Console, Performance → Pages, last 12 months. The top pages and the queries each one appears for are the content that must survive, not just in spirit but in words.
• Record the titles and headings of those pages. Designers rewrite them; Google ranked them.
• Record the backlinks. Any page other sites link to needs a redirect even if the page is being retired.
• Decide the new URL structure now, and keep old URLs where there is no reason to change them. Changing /services/paving/ to /paving-adelaide/ is a change with a cost; make it deliberately.

During the build

• Build the redirect map as a spreadsheet: old URL, new URL, one to one wherever possible. Redirecting fifty old pages to the home page tells Google they are gone.
• Carry the content for the pages that rank. Improve it, extend it, but do not shrink it to fit a template.
• Keep the business details identical to the Google Business Profile: name, phone, address, hours.
• Block the staging site from Google so a half-built copy does not get indexed. Then remember to unblock the real one on launch.
• Structured data, canonicals and the sitemap set up on staging and checked before launch, not after.
• For stores: product and collection URLs are the ones customers and Google have bookmarked. On a Wix-to-Shopify move the handles change; every product and collection needs its own redirect, and retired products redirect to their collection, not to the home page.

Launch day

• Redirects live and tested: a sample of old URLs returns a single 301 to the right new page, not a chain and not a 404.
• Robots and noindex removed from the live site.
• New sitemap submitted in Search Console; old sitemap left in place for a few weeks so Google can see the redirects.
• Google Business Profile website link checked. Analytics and Search Console still receiving data.
• Forms tested with a real submission and the email confirmed received.

The six weeks after

Expect a wobble. Impressions often dip for two to four weeks while Google re-crawls, then recover if the redirects and content are right. Watch Search Console’s Pages report for “Not found (404)” and “Redirect error” entries: each one is a URL you missed. Watch the Performance report for the top old pages; their queries should reappear on the new URLs.

Roam Offroad’s Shopify store, rebuilt from an existing base this year, is the kind of result you want: by 5 October 2026 it was the second organic result for “bull bars adelaide” and fourth for “gvm upgrade adelaide” searched from Adelaide, with Google clicks up 52% over the previous 28 days.

If the migration already went wrong

It is usually recoverable. Pull the old URLs from Search Console’s coverage reports and the Wayback Machine, build the redirect map late, restore the content that ranked, and resubmit. Rankings that were lost to missing redirects often return within weeks once the redirects exist; rankings lost to deleted content take longer. Our technical SEO service starts with exactly this audit.