The biggest worry we hear from business owners thinking about leaving WordPress is simple: will I disappear from Google? It's a fair question. Search rankings take years to build, and a careless move can undo a lot of that.
The good news is that rankings are tied to your content and your addresses, not to WordPress itself. Keep those intact and search engines barely notice the change. Here's what matters.
1. Keep every URL exactly the same
Google ranks individual pages by their address. If /services/water-heaters/ ranks well today, it needs to be at /services/water-heaters/ tomorrow, including the trailing slash.
That means matching WordPress's patterns precisely: page paths, child pages, blog posts with dates in the URL, and category archives. A new site that "cleans up" your URLs is a new site to Google.
2. Redirect anything that has to move
Sometimes an address genuinely has to change. When it does, add a permanent (301) redirect from the old address to the new one. That tells search engines the page has moved, and it passes most of the old page's standing to the new one. It also keeps old links in emails and on other sites working.
3. Bring your SEO titles and descriptions with you
If you use an SEO plugin like Yoast or Rank Math, you've probably written custom titles and descriptions for your important pages. They live in WordPress's database, not on the page itself, so they're easy to lose. Make sure they're copied across, page by page.
4. Publish a fresh sitemap
A sitemap lists every page on your site for search engines. After the move, publish one at /sitemap.xml and submit it in Google Search Console. It speeds up how quickly Google notices the new site.
5. Check every page before you switch
Before pointing your domain at the new site, go through every address from the old sitemap and confirm it exists on the new site with the same content. Doing this by hand is tedious, which is why it's often skipped. It's also the step that catches the page that went missing.
What you can expect afterwards
When the addresses, content and SEO details carry over, most sites see little change in rankings. Many see small improvements over time, because faster pages make for a better experience, and search engines pay attention to that.
At PressFerry, every one of these steps is part of the conversion, and you get a report showing each old address checked on the new site before anything goes live.