How to rebuild a WordPress site and protect your Google rankings
The rebuild is not the risky part. Losing the URLs is. Here is the order of work that gives the new site the best chance of keeping what the old one earned.
For an owner whose site is slow or dated, and who has been told a rebuild might cost them their search traffic.
Most owners who have been online for a few years have the same fear, and it is a reasonable one. The site is old and slow, everybody agrees it needs replacing, but it ranks. Somewhere in there is a page that brings in enquiries every month, and nobody is quite sure which one it is. So the rebuild gets postponed another year.
The fear is aimed at the wrong thing. Rebuilding the design does not cost you rankings. Changing or dropping the addresses of your pages does. Google has spent years learning that a particular URL answers a particular question. If that URL returns a 404 after launch, the learning is thrown away and you start again.
Do the inventory before you touch anything
The first job on a rebuild is not design. It is a complete list of every address the current site answers on. Not the pages someone remembers building. Every one.
- The XML sitemap, which is the easy part and is usually incomplete
- Search Console, for every page that has received an impression in the last sixteen months
- The server access log, which catches the pages that get traffic from old emails and PDFs but are linked from nowhere
- Analytics, for landing pages, so you can see which ones actually matter
- A crawl of the live site, to catch anything the other four missed
On the last catalogue rebuild I did this produced 439 addresses. The client believed the site had about eighty pages. The difference was old category pages, tag archives, paginated listings and a set of product pages nobody had thought about in years, several of which were the entry point for real enquiries.
Write the redirect map before the design is finished
Every address on that list needs a decision, and there are only three: it survives at the same address, it moves to a new one, or it genuinely should not exist any more. Write the decision next to each one in a spreadsheet. That spreadsheet is the redirect map, and it is worth more than the design file.
A redirect to the homepage is not a redirect. Google treats a mass redirect to the homepage as a soft 404 and drops the ranking anyway. Send each page to the closest equivalent page, or let it 404 honestly.
The order of work that actually protects you
- 1
Inventory and map, before anything is built
Every URL listed, every one given a destination. Nothing is designed until this exists.
- 2
Build on a staging address that cannot be indexed
Password protected or noindexed at the server, so a half finished rebuild never gets crawled and never competes with the live site.
- 3
Move the content and localise the images
Images that are still hotlinked from the old host disappear the moment the domain moves. Download them, convert them, and serve them from the new site.
- 4
Test the redirects on staging
Run the full list through automatically and check every one returns 301 to a page that returns 200. Doing this by hand on 439 URLs is how three of them get missed.
- 5
Launch, then submit the new sitemap
Go live, submit the sitemap in Search Console, and request indexing on the ten pages that matter most.
- 6
Watch for a fortnight
Coverage errors and 404s in Search Console, every few days. Rankings wobble for a week or two on any rebuild. What you are watching for is a page that has silently stopped resolving.
What to expect afterwards
Positions move around for a week or two while Google recrawls. That is normal and it is not a reason to panic or to start changing things. What is not normal is traffic that does not recover after a month, and that almost always traces back to a URL that was missed or a redirect chain that goes through three hops before it lands.
Nobody can promise your rankings will improve after a rebuild, and you should be wary of anyone who does. What can be promised is that the rebuild itself will not be the thing that loses them.
Written by Waqas Mehmood, who builds and maintains the sites described here. Lahore, Pakistan. If something in this is wrong or out of date, tell me and it gets corrected rather than quietly left up.