How to move an online store without losing Google rankings

Why does a move put your rankings at risk?

Google knows your store by its URLs. Every indexed page, every link from another site, and every bookmark points to a specific address. When you move to a new platform and the addresses change, an old link that lands on an error page is a link that's lost, and with it some of what Google knew about the page.

The good news: there's an orderly way to do it, and Google lays it out in its guide to site moves and migrations, last updated on Aug 20, 2026. This post walks through it step by step, with the numbers from Hasod, our own online gift store, when it moved off Shopify.

Step 1: How do you map every old URL?

Before anything changes on the server, build a list: every URL on the old site, and the URL it will have on the new one. Google says it's important to map your old site's URLs to the new site's URLs, and suggests where to find them:

• Your sitemaps. Your most important URLs are likely already listed there.
• Your analytics or server logs. The pages that get the most traffic, and any URL visited recently.
• The Links report in Search Console. Pages that other sites and your own pages link to.
• Your store's admin. It can usually list every URL that holds content: products, categories, and pages.
• Images and videos. Their URLs move too, the same way as everything else.

Step 2: Which redirect should you use?

Use a permanent redirect on the server: a 301 or a 308 from each old URL to its new one. Google treats a permanent redirect as a signal that the new URL is the one to show in search. A temporary redirect, like a 302 or a 307, sends no such signal (Google, updated Apr 14, 2026). Google says to use a JavaScript redirect only when neither a server-side redirect nor a meta refresh is possible.

Google adds that 301 and other permanent redirects don't cause a loss in PageRank, and asks you to keep them for as long as possible, generally at least a year. That gives it time to move every signal to the new URLs, including links on other sites that still point to the old ones.

What about products you no longer sell?

• Redirect it to the closest page. A product with no new page can point to its category, or to the shop page when there's no closer one. At Hasod, 108 old product URLs point to the shop page.
• Or answer that it's gone. A 410 says the page is gone for good. Google treats every 4xx answer except 429 the same way: it doesn't index the URL, and drops it if it was indexed (Google, updated Feb 4, 2026). At Hasod, 9 old product URLs answer 410.
• Don't send everything to the home page. Google says redirecting many old URLs to one unrelated page, such as the home page, can confuse shoppers and may be treated as a soft 404 (Google, updated Aug 20, 2026). A map of URL to URL is what Google recommends.

Step 3: Can you keep the same URLs?

The safest URL is one that doesn't change. If your new site runs on the same platform with the same URL structure, the addresses can stay as they are, and there's nothing to redirect. Between platforms, URLs almost always change, because each platform writes them its own way: by default, Shopify uses /products/, Wix uses /product-page/, and WooCommerce uses /product/. That's where the redirect map does the work.

Step 4: What else moves with each page?

A move isn't only text and photos. Each page brings its title, its description, its share image, and its structured data, like a product's price and availability. Search engines use them to understand the page and show it in results.

Google also says your structured data should match the text people see on the page. A price in the structured data that differs from the price on the page is a problem, even if nobody notices it.

Step 5: What do you tell Google after the switch?

1. 1Submit the new sitemap in Search Console. It helps Google learn the new URLs, and you can retire the old sitemap.
2. 2Update internal links. Point your own menus and links straight at the new URLs, not through a redirect.
3. 3Remove anything that blocked crawling during the build. A noindex tag or a robots.txt block left over from testing keeps the new site out of Google.
4. 4Watch for errors. An unusual number of “Not found” errors in Search Console can mean redirects that point to the wrong URL.
5. 5Make sure your server can take it. Google crawls a moved site more heavily than usual for a while.

How long until rankings settle?

Google says it plainly: your visibility in Search may go up and down during a move. That's normal, and rankings settle over time. For a medium-sized site, it can take a few weeks or more before Google shows the new URLs instead of the old ones, and longer for a large one.

So plan the switch for a quiet stretch, not your busiest week of the year. And keep the old site selling until the new one is built, checked, and approved.

The checklist, in one table

How does a move with MOVA work?

We move your products, photos, pages, and content, and point every old link to its new page. Customers and order history come along where your current platform can export them. Your current site keeps selling as usual while we build the new one, and the new site goes live only after you approve it.

Where you rank is Google's call, so no one can promise you a position, and we won't either. What we can do is give Google everything it needs to see that each page moved.

Once Lumi, your AI website agent, joins your store, she looks after the site. At Basic, that means a site check once a month: speed, broken links, and titles for Google. The team joins one department at a time.