Will I lose my Google rankings if I migrate my website?

Not if the migration is done properly. Google notices every platform move — expect a few weeks of turbulence while it recrawls the new site. Managed well, that's a wobble: rankings dip slightly and recover, often to a better position if the new site is faster. Managed badly — redirects missed, metadata dropped, nobody watching Search Console — the dip becomes the new normal, and you're effectively relaunching from zero.

What is a 301 redirect and why does it matter in a migration?

A 301 is a permanent forwarding instruction: this page has moved, here is its new address. It's how Google transfers the authority a URL has earned to its replacement. In a migration, every product, category, page and blog post on the old site needs a 301 to its equivalent on the new one — mapped individually, not guessed at with wildcards. A missed redirect on a high-traffic page is how months of SEO work quietly disappears.

How does Shopify handle 301 redirects?

Shopify has a built-in URL Redirects tool (Online Store → Navigation → URL Redirects) that accepts individual redirects or a CSV import — which is what a proper migration uses, because a store of any size has hundreds of URLs to map. Shopify's own URL patterns are fixed (/products/, /collections/, /pages/), so nearly every URL from WordPress, Wix, Magento or EKM will change and nearly every URL needs a mapped redirect.

What should a website migration SEO checklist include?

Baseline first: a full crawl of the old site, a Search Console export, and a snapshot of current rankings — you can't protect what you haven't measured. Then the redirect map covering every URL, titles and meta descriptions carried across, the new sitemap submitted, and Search Console watched daily through cutover and weekly for the following month. The order matters: the baseline comes before the build, not after the drop.

Does a website redesign affect SEO even without changing platform?

Yes — a redesign that changes URLs, deletes pages, or rebuilds page structure is a migration in disguise, and it carries the same risks. Plenty of businesses lose rankings to a 'refresh' that never called itself a migration, because nobody mapped the old URLs to the new ones. If the redesign keeps every URL, title and heading intact, the risk is much smaller — but that's rarer than agencies suggest.

How long does it take for rankings to recover after a migration?

With a proper redirect map, most sites see turbulence for two to six weeks while Google recrawls and reconciles the old URLs with the new ones. Positions wobble, impressions dip, then recover — often to a stronger position, because the new site is usually faster. If rankings are still falling at week eight, something is wrong: usually missed redirects, blocked crawling, or dropped metadata, and Search Console will show you which.

Website Migration SEO: Keep Your Rankings When You Move

The risk in a platform move isn’t the build. The build is the easy part. The risk is quietly losing the search visibility your business spent years earning — and finding out three months later, when the phone has already gone quiet.

An enquiry came in recently from a business with a healthy site and years of accumulated rankings, wanting to move platforms. They’d had quotes already. Every quote talked about the build — the design, the features, the launch date. Not one of them mentioned what would happen to the rankings, and that silence was the thing keeping the owner awake. She didn’t need convincing the new platform was better. She needed to know the move wouldn’t cost her the ground she’d built.

That’s the right thing to worry about, and it gets worried about far too late. So here’s the whole picture: why migrations lose rankings, what actually protects them, and the checklist I run on every move I do.

Why rankings drop after a website migration

Google doesn’t rank your website. It ranks your URLs — individually. Every page that brings you traffic has earned its position over years: it’s been crawled hundreds of times, linked to, clicked on, and slowly trusted. That trust is attached to the address, not to your business name.

Move platforms and nearly every address changes. WordPress puts products at /product/; Shopify puts them at /products/. Wix generates its own URL patterns; so do Magento and EKM. The content might come across perfectly, and as far as Google is concerned every page it trusted has vanished, replaced by a site full of strangers.

Google ranks URLs, not businesses. Change every address without forwarding instructions and you’ve relaunched from zero — whatever the new site looks like.

It’s moving house without telling anyone — not the bank, not the doctor, nobody but the milkman. The post doesn’t follow you. It piles up at a house you no longer live in, and eventually the senders stop writing.

The honest answer: a wobble, not a loss

Will a migration affect your rankings? Yes. Anyone who tells you Google won’t notice a platform move is selling something. Google recrawls the whole site, reconciles old addresses against new ones, and re-evaluates as it goes. Expect two to six weeks of turbulence — positions shifting, impressions dipping and recovering.

Managed properly, that’s the whole story: a wobble, then business as usual, and often better than usual, because the new site is usually faster and page speed is a ranking factor. I’ve watched sites come out of a migration stronger than they went in — see the migration timeline guide for what that recovery actually looks like week by week.

Done properly, a platform move is a wobble. Done badly, it’s a relaunch from zero — and Google owes you nothing for the years before.

The difference between those two outcomes isn’t luck, and it isn’t the platform. It’s whether somebody built the redirect map.

301 redirects: the map where migrations are won

A 301 redirect is a permanent forwarding instruction. It tells Google: this page has moved, here’s the new address, transfer everything it earned. It is the single mechanism by which your SEO survives a migration, and it has to cover everything — every product, every category, every page, every blog post. Mapped individually, old URL to new URL, in a spreadsheet you can hand to anyone and defend line by line.

Not wildcards and hope. Wildcard rules catch the pattern and miss the exceptions, and the exceptions are always the pages that matter — the product that ranks page one for its money keyword, the guide that brings half the organic traffic. One missed redirect on a page like that costs more than the migration fee.

On Shopify the mechanics are straightforward: a built-in URL Redirects tool that takes a CSV import, which is what any store of real size needs — I’ve built redirect maps that run to hundreds of rows from a single WordPress store, and a 24,000-customer EKM migration where the export was so non-standard the map had to be built from scratch. The tool is simple. The discipline is the product.

The redirects get treated as the boring bit, which is exactly why they get skipped. The build gets the meetings; the redirect map gets whoever’s left on a Friday afternoon.

The site migration checklist — and why it starts before the build

Every migration I do runs the same sequence, and the order is the point. The first deliverable in a migration isn’t the design. It’s the baseline.

The migration SEO checklist

Baseline before anything. Full crawl of the old site (every URL that exists), Search Console export (every query and page earning impressions), rankings snapshot. This is the record of what you’re protecting.
The redirect map. Every old URL mapped to its new equivalent. Reviewed against the baseline so nothing that earns traffic is missing.
Metadata carried across. Titles and meta descriptions moved, not rewritten from scratch mid-migration. One change at a time — move first, improve after.
Sitemap submitted at cutover. The new sitemap into Search Console the day the site goes live, so Google starts recrawling on your schedule.
Search Console watched. Daily through cutover, weekly for a month. Impressions by page tell you within days if a redirect is missing.

The baseline earns its place twice. It’s protection during the move, and it’s proof afterwards — the before-and-after that separates “the migration cost us traffic” from “the migration cost us nothing and the new site converts better.” Without it, whoever did the move wears every dip that follows, deserved or not. I take the baseline before I quote, because I want to know the job is winnable before either of us commits to it. If you’re still weighing up whether to move at all, that’s a different decision — and sometimes the honest answer is to stay put.

Website redesign SEO: a redesign is a migration wearing a nicer name

The trap that catches businesses who never planned to migrate: a redesign that changes URLs is a migration. Same platform, same domain, new structure — pages renamed, categories merged, old blog posts culled. Every one of those changes breaks an address Google trusted, and a “refresh” that never called itself a migration gets none of a migration’s discipline. No baseline, no redirect map, no monitoring. Just a slow, unexplained decline that gets blamed on the algorithm.

If your agency is proposing a redesign, ask one question: does any URL change? If the answer is yes — or a shrug — the checklist above applies in full.

What this means if you’re about to move

The platform decision gets all the attention, and it matters — but whichever way you go, the SEO risk is the same shape, and it’s managed the same way. Baseline, redirect map, metadata, sitemap, monitoring. None of it is glamorous. All of it is the difference between a move and a loss.

If you’re planning a migration and the quotes you’re holding don’t mention redirects, that’s the tell. The migration cost guide covers what a proper move costs and what’s included — the redirect map isn’t an add-on, it’s the job. And if you want a straight answer on whether your rankings would survive a move, get in touch — the baseline takes me a morning, and it’s the most useful document you’ll read before you sign anything.

Related: the Shopify migration cost guide covers what a proper move costs, the migration timeline shows the two weeks day by day, WordPress to Shopify and Wix to Shopify walk the two most common source platforms, and should I fix or rebuild my website is the decision that comes before any of it.