How to Keep Your URLs and Google Rankings When You Switch Website Builders

You keep your rankings by keeping every important URL alive, either at its old address or redirected to a specific new one with a 301 status code. A new design doesn't cost you rankings; new, un-redirected URLs do. The work is mechanical: list every URL that gets traffic or links, decide its new address, set a 301 redirect for each one, and then confirm Google sees the move. Skipping the mapping step and just "launching the new site" is the single most common way sites lose search traffic during a builder switch.

Which URLs do I need to list first?

Before you touch the new site, get a full list of your current URLs. Combine two sources:

• Google Search Console's Pages report (or the Performance report filtered by page) shows every URL that's indexed or getting clicks and impressions — this is your priority list.
• A crawl of your current site (any crawler that follows links, run against your live domain) catches pages Search Console hasn't picked up, including ones with external backlinks but few or no visits.

Note each URL's type — homepage, blog post, product, category/tag, form landing page — since builders often restructure whole URL patterns per type, not page by page.

How do I map each old URL to a new one?

For each URL in the inventory, decide its exact new address before launch. Skip "close enough" — a 301 redirect that lands on a different page than the one Google indexed is a weaker signal than one that lands on the true replacement.

Example (hypothetical): a site moving its blog from Squarespace to a new platform, illustrating the mapping — not a real migration.

Where a page has genuinely nothing to replace it, redirect to the most relevant surviving page (a parent category, not the homepage by default) — Google's own site-move documentation explains that this kind of mapping, not a blanket homepage redirect, is what carries ranking signals forward (Google Search Central).

What URL patterns did my old builder use?

Redirect sources are easier to find when you know the pattern your old builder used:

• Squarespace blog posts publish as the blog page's slug followed by the post's slug — for example /blog/example-post — and you can edit the default format per site, though existing posts don't retroactively change (Squarespace).
• Wix blog posts use a /post/ prefix by default (for example /post/post-title); Wix says you can rename that segment but not remove it entirely (Wix).
• Webflow CMS Collection pages follow whatever URL structure you set per Collection, and redirects for a slug change can be created automatically if you check "Permanently redirect the old URL to this new one" in Page settings (Webflow).

How do I set the 301 redirects on the new platform?

Squarespace destination: open the Developer tools panel, then URL mappings, and enter one rule per line in the format /old-url -> /new-url 301. Squarespace also accepts patterns such as /blog/[name] -> /posts/[name] 301 for a whole section. Squarespace requires the old URL to no longer exist on the site and the new one to exist (Squarespace).

Wix destination: go to SEO & GEO in the site dashboard, scroll to Tools and settings, open the URL Redirect Manager, then create a single redirect (old URL, new URL) or a group redirect for a whole path pattern. Wix explicitly notes that changing a Wix Blog post's slug does not create a redirect automatically — you have to add it yourself in the URL Redirect Manager (Wix).

Webflow destination: add redirects under Site settings → Publishing → 301 redirects, with an "Old Path" (must start with /) and a destination page. Adding redirects needs a paid Site plan or a paid Workspace plan. Webflow recommends wildcard rules for whole path patterns (like everything under /old-blog/) to keep the rule count down, and notes that redirects are relative to the root domain and don't apply to localized slugs (Webflow).

Self-hosted WordPress destination: WordPress core has no built-in single-page redirect screen. The common approach is a dedicated plugin such as Redirection, which manages 301s and logs 404s from the WordPress admin (WordPress.org), or a rule added at the web-server level (.htaccess on Apache, or your host's equivalent) if you manage that directly.

WordPress.com destination (whole-domain move): if you're moving an entire .wordpress.com address (not individual pages) to a different domain, WordPress.com's Site Redirect feature forwards the domain and all its permalinks; it works at the domain or directory level, not for individual files or pages (WordPress.com).

How do I check the redirects worked?

1. File a Change of Address in Search Console, from a domain-level property, if you're also changing domains. Google says this tells it to prioritize crawling the new site over the old one and forwards your old site's signals to the new one. Google says to keep the redirects for at least 180 days, and longer while old URLs still get search traffic; after 180 days it treats the two sites as unrelated (Google Search Console Help).
2. Spot-check individual URLs with the URL Inspection tool in Search Console to confirm Google can crawl and index the new address, and to request a recrawl of pages you've changed (Google Search Console Help).
3. Re-crawl your own new site with the same tool you used for the inventory, and confirm every mapped old URL now returns a real 301 to the intended new URL, not a 302, not a redirect chain (old → intermediate → final), and not a 404.
4. Watch Search Console's Pages report for a spike in "Not found (404)" or "Page with redirect" over the following weeks; that's your signal a mapping was missed.
5. Check your server or host logs for requests to old URLs that never got mapped — real visitors and crawlers will surface gaps your inventory missed.

What if I missed a URL?

A redirect map is never perfectly complete on day one. If a URL turns up 404 after launch, add the missing mapping immediately — every day it's unmapped is a day of lost link equity and frustrated visitors, but nothing is unrecoverable as long as you still know (or can look up) what the old URL was and where the equivalent content now lives. The redirects themselves live on the new platform, so you can add a missing one at any time. What you can lose is the knowledge of what the old URL was: keep your URL inventory, a crawl export and a content export of the old site after you cancel it, so a 404 in Search Console can always be traced to its replacement page. Never redirect large numbers of unrelated old URLs to the homepage as a shortcut — Google and users both treat that as a weaker signal than a specific redirect, and it makes genuine broken links harder to find in your reports.

If you're moving off Squarespace, Webflow, WordPress, or Wix specifically, our platform guides cover the rebuild alongside the URL work: migrate from Squarespace, migrate from Webflow, migrate from WordPress, and move from Wix to an AI website builder.