Moving from WordPress to a modern website without losing your Google rankings

Why businesses leave WordPress

WordPress itself is well maintained. The trouble is the layer around it: the theme, the page builder and the plugins a site picks up over the years. 52.8% of WordPress sites run at least one plugin with a known vulnerability³, and 11,334 new WordPress vulnerabilities were disclosed in 2025, 91% of them in plugins⁴.

The same layer slows the site down. Only 38.4% of WordPress sites pass Google's Core Web Vitals on a phone, the lowest of any major platform⁵. And keeping it all patched is a recurring bill: agency care plans for WordPress run $199 to $499 a month⁶.

A modern static site removes that layer. Pages are built in advance and served as files, so there's no PHP, plugin or database for anyone to attack, and nothing to patch each week.

What Google needs to see after the move

Google ranks pages, not platforms. If the same content sits at the same address after the move, Google has nothing to relearn. Where an address has to change, Google's guidance for a site move is a permanent redirect from each old URL to its new equivalent¹. A 301 or 308 redirect is a strong signal that the new page should take the old one's place in results².

What goes wrong is usually one of three things:

• Pages that disappear. An old blog post or service page that earned links simply isn't rebuilt, so its address returns a 404.
• Redirects to the homepage. Pointing many old URLs at one unrelated page. Google's guide warns against it¹.
• Lost page details. Titles, descriptions, headings and structured data that the old theme wrote and the new site doesn't.

Mapping every URL

Start with a list of every address the old site has. Combine three sources: the XML sitemap, a full crawl of the site, and the pages Search Console reports as getting impressions. The crawl finds pages the sitemap forgot; Search Console finds old addresses that still get traffic from links.

Then give each one a destination. Keep the address identical wherever you can. WordPress addresses like /services/teeth-whitening/ are easy to keep on any modern site. Where an address changes, write a redirect to the page that answers the same question.

Carrying the content across

Export the content itself, not screenshots of it: posts, pages, images and their alt text, and any custom fields. WordPress can export to XML, and its REST API lists every post with its address. Check that headings stay headings and lists stay lists, since page builders often fake them with styled text.

Launch day and the 90 days after

Test every redirect on the new site before the domain moves, then again once it's live. After launch, submit the new sitemap in Search Console and watch two reports: pages indexed, and pages not found. Fix any 404 that had traffic the same day. Rankings often move around for a few weeks after any site move; what matters is that every page Google knew about still resolves.

Keep the redirects in place for at least a year¹. They cost nothing to keep on a static host, so there's no reason to remove them.