Migrate your website without losing search rankings

The first job in a migration is an inventory, because you can only protect the pages you know about. Kite reads your live site page by page, including pages that only render with JavaScript, and records each page's address, title, description, headings, and structured data. It captures screenshots of your main page types, such as the homepage, pricing, product pages, and blog posts, so the new site can be compared against the old one later.

Then Kite works out which pages matter most for search. Its built-in search data shows the keywords your site ranks for and where. If you connect Google Search Console, Kite also reads the clicks, impressions, and average position for each page and query over recent months. That record becomes your baseline.

The baseline decides what gets the most care. A blog post from 2022 that still brings in 400 visits a month keeps its address and its copy. A thin tag archive that has never earned a click can be dropped and redirected to the blog home instead.

Kite rebuilds your site from the live pages, so you don't need to export anything or give Kite your old platform's login. It reads the text on each page, collects the images that matter, extracts your logo, and records your brand colors and fonts. Facts carry over exactly as they appear: your prices, addresses, phone numbers, testimonials, and product details.

By default, the new site follows your current one. If the move is also your chance to fix a cluttered homepage or a buried demo request, tell Kite, and it builds those changes into the new site. Kite shows you design options built from your content, and the one you pick becomes your new site.

Every page gets a layout for phones and tablets, and Kite rebuilds your contact and signup forms. The new site comes with a built-in content editor, so your team can change page text without a developer, and those edits go live right away.

Your old addresses are where your rankings live, so Kite keeps as many of them unchanged as it can. When you keep your domain and the new site uses the same paths, Google finds each page exactly where it was, and most of the move is invisible to search.

Some addresses do change. WordPress sites often carry dated addresses such as /2021/06/our-new-service/, and a rebuild is a natural time to give that page a cleaner one. For every address that changes, Kite sets up a permanent redirect, which tells browsers and search engines that the page has moved for good and passes the old page's standing to the new one. Kite points each redirect straight at its final page, so nobody bounces through a chain of them, and it never redirects an address that still has a live page.

Kite also carries over the search details on every page. It moves page titles, descriptions, canonical URLs, and structured data, builds a new sitemap, and sets up your robots.txt file and your llms.txt file, which tells AI systems what your site contains. It checks the site's internal links so no page points to an address that no longer exists.

You see the whole new site before your visitors do. Kite's finished work waits as unpublished changes, and you open a preview of each page while your current site stays live. You can put the old and new versions of a page side by side and tell Kite in the conversation what to change.

When you're happy, approve with the Publish button or a reply, in the Kite web app or in Slack. Kite shows the list of changes that will ship, publishes them together, and gives you the live address. Then you connect your domain to the new site, which is the moment visitors and search engines start reaching it.

Publishing is reversible. You can undo a single change without losing the ones after it, or restore an earlier version of the site.

Kite checks the new site as soon as it goes live, before a broken page has time to cost you traffic. Shortly after each publish, it checks the site's speed, search basics, and structured data, and emails the person who published if it finds a problem. It also requests your old addresses on the live site to confirm that each one lands on the right new page.

With Search Console connected, Kite confirms that Google has indexed your new pages and flags any that were dropped or blocked. It submits the new sitemap and reads back how many of its addresses Google has indexed. On a paid plan, a site Kite hosts on your own domain is registered in Search Console automatically, and Kite submits the sitemap after every publish.

Over the following weeks, Kite compares your search clicks, impressions, and average position with the baseline it recorded before the move. A small wobble in the first few weeks is normal while Google processes the move. A page that keeps losing traffic is a sign that something didn't carry over, such as a missing section or a redirect pointing to the wrong place, and Kite proposes the fix. Google recommends keeping redirects in place for at least a year, and Kite leaves them in place.