On 15 September 2026 I pulled the list of URLs from my old website that appear on Google. Just one of them, /disenador-web-freelance/, had shown up 24,256 times in 90 days. If the new website forgets about it, that traffic lands on a 404 and Google drops it from the index.
I'm Nico, a freelance digital marketing consultant in Seville. On 1 October 2026 I'm launching my new website, hand-coded, on the same domain where there was a WordPress site. I'll walk you through the process with my own URLs. It's the same one I follow when I redesign a client's website as part of my web design service.
What do you lose when you change your website, and why?
You lose whatever isn't redirected. Google handles a move “URL by URL”. Each old address has its history of links, impressions and clicks. That history only passes to the new one if a permanent redirect connects them. Without it, the old one returns a 404, Google drops it from the index and the new one starts from scratch.
There's a second, quieter loss. Google warns that combining a move, a redesign and new URLs will “probably” cost traffic for a while. Even if the redirects are right. Its advice is to change just one thing at a time.
I haven't followed it entirely. I'm keeping the domain, but changing the platform, the design and a good share of the URLs on the same day. I accept the dip. What I do to keep it small comes next.
The three phases, with timelines
| Phase | What you do | Tools | When |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Inventory | A list of all old URLs with impressions, clicks or external links, and a decision for each one: keep, redirect or retire | Search Console (90 days, by page), GA4, old sitemap, a crawl of the site | Before designing anything |
| 2. Redirect map | One new URL for each old one, as close as possible in content; server-side 301; self-referencing canonical on each new page; internal links updated; new sitemap | Spreadsheet, .htaccess or the CMS redirect manager | During development, before going live |
| 3. Launch and monitoring | Remove the noindex from the staging environment, check every redirect, submit the sitemap, review 404 errors and impressions by page | Search Console, a script that requests every old URL | Day 0, day 7, day 30, day 90 |
Phase 1: the inventory (one or two days). Open Search Console, go to the performance report, filter by page and export the last 90 days. Add the landing pages from GA4 and the URLs with links from other websites. You end up with a sheet with three columns: old URL, impressions and what I do with it. On mine, the portfolio pages with a client's name were still getting impressions years later. All of them are kept, as case studies.
Phase 2: the map (two to five days). Each old URL points to the new page that answers the same search. A client's page goes to their new case study. The old service page goes to the new service page. Google recommends server-side permanent redirects “whenever possible”: 301 or 308. The new page carries a canonical pointing to itself. And internal links are changed by hand. Every redirect hop means load time and a weaker signal.
Phase 3: go live and watch (day 0 and three reviews). The staging environment carries a noindex so that Google doesn't index it. On day 0 it comes off. Launching the new website with the noindex still in place is the silliest and most expensive mistake. Then a script requests every old URL and checks that it returns a 301 to the right one. The new sitemap is submitted. At 7 days I look at the 404 errors in Search Console. At 30, impressions by page compared with before. At 90, the position of the 20 searches that matter to me.
My own migration: 1 October
The data, exactly as it stands today on the staging server:
- 37 URLs from the old website redirected one by one: 9 pages, 24 portfolio pages (now case studies) and 4 blog categories.
- 7 generic rules: WordPress sitemaps to the new sitemap, feeds, pagination and uploaded file paths.
- The 9 blog articles keep their URL. Two of them are the best-ranked pages on the domain: “consultoría estratégica digital” and “consultoría de marketing digital para pequeñas empresas”. Touching their address would have meant throwing away the little that already works.
- /disenador-web-freelance/ becomes /diseno-web/. It's the URL with the most impressions on the domain: 24,256 in 90 days. If I could only redirect one, it would be that one.
What disappears without a redirect: six Elementor table-of-contents anchors that Google had indexed as pages. The new website doesn't have them and there's nowhere to send them. They return a 404 and Google will drop them. That's what its documentation describes for any 4xx.
Baseline for comparison: on 29 September I measure position and impressions for “diseñador web freelance”. On 27 October I repeat it. I'll share whatever I find in this article.
What I see with my clients
The biggest migration I've done was for Factoría Serendipia. Several websites that had to move to better infrastructure, with no downtime and without losing rankings. It took me a month. Eight websites spread across eight servers moved to just one. The result, in the words of the case study: everything moved, nothing broken. Nobody noticing is exactly what success looks like.
When a client asks me how long it takes, this is what I tell them. For a service business website with fewer than a hundred URLs, two to four weeks of work. Inventory, map and checks included. And one to three months until Search Console settles down. That's my estimate, based on my projects. Google only says “a few weeks or more” for a medium-sized site.
The mistakes I see most often when I inherit a migration someone else did:
- Everything redirected to the home page. Google treats it as if the pages had disappeared.
- Forgotten images and PDFs: they're still linked from other websites and return a 404.
- Changing domain, CMS, design and URLs on the same day, with no inventory.
- Deleting the old website without a full backup.
- The
noindexfrom the staging environment, still in place after launch.
Before you change your website, measure the one you have
If you're going to redesign your website, the first hour of the project is the inventory. The design can wait. In the Diagnostic Session I go through your Search Console with you and tell you which URLs you can't afford to lose. Free, 30 minutes, two slots a week. Book yours. Not sure yet what to build it with? Here's WordPress or a coded website: which to choose for your business. And search rankings after the change, in SEO and search rankings.
Sources
- Google Search Central, Site moves with URL changes (move URL by URL, “a few weeks or more”, change one thing at a time, 301 redirects don't lose PageRank; updated on 20 August 2026): https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/site-move-with-url-changes?hl=es
- Google Search Central, Redirects and Google Search (server-side permanent redirect, 301 and 308; 14 April 2026): https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/301-redirects?hl=es
- Search Console Help, Change of Address tool (domains only; 180 days; not for moving pages within the same site): https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9370220?hl=es
- Google Search Central, How to specify a canonical URL (redirect and canonical as strong signals; 10 July 2026): https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/consolidate-duplicate-urls?hl=es
- Google Search Central, How HTTP status codes affect Google's crawlers (4xx: content ignored and URL dropped from the index; 4 February 2026): https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/troubleshooting/http-status-codes?hl=es
- Google Search Central, Learn about sitemaps (when you need one; 10 December 2025): https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/sitemaps/overview?hl=es
- Google Search Central, Changing hosting without changing URLs (10 December 2025): https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/site-move-no-url-changes?hl=es
- My own data:
.htaccessfor the new auvenico.es website (September 2026), auvenico.es Search Console (90 days, September 2026) and the published Factoría Serendipia case study.
Freelance digital marketing consultant in Seville. I work on the digital presence of professionals and small businesses with one simple principle: your website as your operations hub. Building websites, doing SEO and running social media with my own hands since 2018.
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