Not if the old site's addresses come with you. A redesign doesn't cost a business its place on Google; broken addresses do. Every page Google already knows has to point somewhere sensible on the new site, permanently, in one step. Do that, watch the results for a few weeks after launch, and a new site usually helps more than it hurts.
The trouble is that many old sites have been covering for missing pages for years, and nobody knows.
Your old WordPress site is quietly guessing
When someone visits an address that no longer exists on a WordPress site, WordPress doesn't always show an error. It looks for a page with a similar name and quietly sends the visitor there. Most owners never find out, because from the outside everything seems to work.
A site that has been redesigned once or twice can have dozens of old addresses living on this way, with no redirect anyone ever wrote. Some guesses land on the right page. Some land on an unrelated post from years ago. Nobody chose either.
Move that site to any other platform and every one of those guesses disappears at once, because the guessing was WordPress's habit, not part of the site. That's not a reason to stay on WordPress. It's a reason to know exactly what your old site has been answering for before you leave it.
What actually costs you rankings
Google ranks pages, and it finds them by their addresses. When a new site launches and the old addresses lead to a "page not found" error, a few things happen:
- People who saved a page, or clicked a link from another site, hit a dead end and leave.
- Google eventually drops those addresses from its results, and whatever standing they'd earned goes with them.
- Links from other websites, which took years to collect, now point at nothing.
None of that is caused by the new design. It's caused by addresses that weren't carried over.
How a move keeps your rankings
- Take inventory first. List every address the old site has: its sitemap, Google Search Console's list of pages, and past versions of the site in the Wayback Machine, which catches pages that were retired long ago but still have links pointing at them.
- Give every old address one new home. Each gets a permanent redirect (a "301") straight to the closest matching page on the new site. One step, not a chain of hops, and never everything dumped on the home page.
- Watch after launch. For the first few weeks, check Search Console for "not found" errors and fix any address the inventory missed.
Content comes along too
If a page ranked because it answered a question well, the new site should still answer it. A redesign is a good time to make that answer clearer, but not a time to drop it. Before anything is cut, it's worth knowing which pages bring in visitors and which questions they answer. Addresses are still where most moves go wrong, and they're the easiest part to get right on purpose.
What else a careful move carries over
Addresses come first, but they aren't the only thing search engines read. A careful move also brings over:
- Page titles and descriptions, the lines Google shows in its results. Carried over, or rewritten on purpose, never left blank.
- Structured data, the behind-the-scenes labels that tell search engines your business name, address, hours and services in a format they can read without guessing.
- Your images' descriptions, which help search engines and screen readers alike understand what each photo shows.
- The sitemap, submitted fresh in Search Console on launch day, so Google learns the new site's layout quickly.
None of these are glamorous. Each one is a few minutes of attention that keeps the new site as readable to Google as the old one was, and usually more.
And AI assistants
More of your customers now ask an AI assistant instead of typing a search. Those tools find and quote pages by their addresses too, often the same addresses Google lists. An old address that leads to a dead end is one they can't use.
The same care covers both: every old address with a home, plain answers on the pages, and structured data that says who you are. A move done that way gives search engines and AI assistants a clearer picture of your business than the old site did. Our AI search optimization page covers the rest of that work.
What to ask before your site moves
Ask whoever is building it: "Which of my old addresses are you redirecting, and where will each one go?" A good answer is a list. If the answer is "we'll handle it," ask to see the list anyway. It's your site, and the list belongs to you.
If your site is on WordPress and you're thinking about moving, our WordPress modernization page covers what a move involves. And if you'd like a second pair of eyes on your old addresses before you decide anything, we're happy to look.
