How to Switch Website Companies Without Losing Google Traffic

You are paying a web company you have stopped liking. Slow replies, a bill for every small change, a page that still lists last year's prices.

So you want out. The thing stopping you is a fair worry: if you switch, does everything you have built up on Google go with it?

It does not have to. The order you do things in decides that, not the company you pick.

Google follows addresses, not companies

Google has no idea who built your website. It has never known, and it does not care.

What it keeps track of is addresses. Your page at yoursite.com/hot-towel-shave has earned a certain amount of credit over time: people searched, they clicked it, they stayed. That credit is attached to the address.

Move the site and let that address go dead, and the credit has nowhere to land. Move it and leave a forwarding note, and the credit follows the note.

The forwarding note has a name. It is called a redirect, and setting them up is the whole job. Everything else in this post exists to serve it.

Find out whose name the domain is in, before you give notice

This is the one thing that can stop the plan dead, so check it first, while you are still a paying customer and everyone is still friendly.

Your domain is your address: yoursite.com. It is registered with a registrar, and one name sits on it as the registrant. That name should be yours or your business's.

Look it up on any public WHOIS lookup. Type your domain in, read the registrant.

• Your name or your business name. Good. You control the move and there is nothing else to do here.
• Your web company's name. Common, and usually fixable, but fix it now. Ask them in writing to move the domain into an account in your name.
• A privacy service with no name shown. Normal. Log in to the registrar account and check there. If you have never had that login, ask for it today.

Whoever builds your next site, the domain stays in your name. What you own and what you rent covers the arrangement in plain words, and the web design red flags worth knowing covers what to do when a company will not hand it over.

Write down every address on your old site

You are making a map: the old address on the left, the page that replaces it on the right.

You do not need a tool. Three passes, on your phone if you like.

1. Search Google for site:yoursite.com, exactly like that, with your own domain. Google lists the pages of yours it knows about. Write each one down.
2. Walk your own menu. Open your site and tap every link. Some pages never made Google's list and still get visits.
3. Check the links you have handed out. Your Google listing's website link, your Instagram bio, a booking link printed on a card.

Most local business sites come to somewhere between five and twenty addresses. It is a smaller job than it sounds.

Point each old address at the page that replaces it

Now fill in the right-hand column.

• A page that still exists gets its own match. The old /hot-towel-shave goes to the new /services/hot-towel-shave. One to one.
• A page with no exact replacement goes to the nearest real page. An old /specials page goes to the services page.
• Do not send everything to the homepage. It is the lazy version, and it throws away the specific match. Someone searching for a hot towel shave lands on a homepage and has to start the hunt over.

Hand that map to whoever builds the new site. Setting up the redirects is their job. The map is yours, because you are the one who knows which page replaced which.

Google's own guidance for moving a site says the same thing: redirect the old addresses to the new ones, and leave them redirecting.

Do not cancel the old host first

This is how owners actually lose traffic, and it is always the same story.

The owner signs with someone new, cancels the old hosting that same afternoon to stop the bill, and the old site disappears before the new one is ready. For as long as that gap lasts, every search result pointing at the business leads nowhere.

The order that works:

1. The new site is built and you have seen it.
2. The new site goes live on your domain.
3. You test it yourself. Type three or four old addresses into your phone and check each one lands on the right new page.
4. Then, and only then, you cancel the old hosting.

One extra month of overlap costs less than a gap does. What hosting is and what it should cost is worth reading before you cancel anything.

Judge both sites on the same checks

Switching carefully to a worse site is still switching to a worse site.

Grove Batu Barbershop in Coconut Grove had a Wix site. The report card grades the old site and the rebuild on the same checks, so the comparison is not a matter of taste. Ask for something like that from whoever you hire, and look at it before the domain moves. That side by side is part of how the website gets designed and run.

Update the links you control

Redirects take care of links other people put up. These are yours to fix.

• Your Google listing's website link. The most important one. Point it at the new address, and check that the hours and phone number on the new site match the listing exactly.
• Your Instagram and Facebook bios.
• Anything printed. Cards, the van, invoices, the window.

What the first two weeks look like

Expect a little wobble. Positions move around for a few days after a switch and then settle.

Once a week, on your phone:

• Search your business name. The new site should come up.
• Search site:yoursite.com again. New pages should be appearing in the list.
• Type two old addresses in. They should still land on the right pages.

What not to do is panic on day three and switch back. A half-finished move is worse than either site on its own.

If something is still wrong a month later, it is nearly always one of two things: an address with no forwarding note, or a Google listing still pointing at the old site.

The whole job, in one line

Get the domain in your name, map every old address to its new page, and keep the old site up until the new one is live and tested. Nothing in that list requires you to understand hosting.

Type your business name at 30secondsites.com and see the site built from your Google listing, next to the one you have now. Looking is free. No card, no login, no email until you want to keep it.