How do you avoid losing rankings when replatforming or redesigning a site?
Treat the URL map as a core deliverable. Most traffic lost during a migration results from avoidable issues: changed URLs without redirects, redirect chains or loops, staging settings that block search engines after launch, content dropped without review, and internal links pointing to old URLs. Comparing a crawl of the old site with a crawl of the new site identifies these before launch.
The process begins with a full crawl of the existing site, recording every indexable URL with its traffic and inbound links. Each URL is then kept, merged or retired, and a single-hop redirect map is created and independently reviewed before the new site is built.
Immediately after launch, confirm that search engines are not blocked by settings carried over from staging. This is one of the most damaging and most preventable migration errors.
Some ranking fluctuation is normal for a few weeks while search engines recrawl the site. A baseline captured before the migration makes it possible to tell normal fluctuation from a genuine decline.
Redirects should be kept in place permanently, so external links continue to pass value.
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