“If we leave WordPress, we’ll drop off Google.” That sentence keeps tired websites in place. It usually comes from the person who built the site, and it is rarely explained. Here is the explanation, and the short list of things that do remove a listing.

Three different Googles

Owners say “our Google listing” and mean one of three things. Only one of them lives in WordPress.

The search result. The blue line, the grey address under it, the two lines of text. That is one page of your website. Google stores the address. The program that assembled the page is not part of the listing.

The Maps profile. The pin, the hours, the reviews, the photos. This is a Google Business Profile. It sits in a Google account, not in WordPress. Leaving WordPress leaves it where it is. What it needs afterwards is the same thing it needs now: the website button on the profile still opens.

The ads. If you pay for them, they live in an ads account. A new website does not cancel them. An ad breaks when the address it points at stops existing.

The rest of this article is about the search result. That is the one people are afraid of losing.

What a search result is made of

Take a page a heating firm wants to be found for, at an address like yours.co.uk/boilers/. The listing is that address, plus a title, plus Google’s reading of the page.

The title is the blue line. It usually comes from the page’s own title, the words in the browser tab. An SEO plugin such as Yoast or Rank Math is often what writes them. The traffic-light score inside that plugin is the plugin’s own checklist. Google never receives it. Google also rewrites titles when it prefers another line from the page, which is why the blue line and the browser tab sometimes disagree. The two grey lines underneath are often Google’s own summary, not the description you typed.

The rest is the words on the page, and the links other sites have made to that address. A link to /boilers/ is a vote for /boilers/. It is not a vote for WordPress.

So the listing survives a change of software when four things are still true: the address opens, the title is the one you meant, the page still says what it said, and Google is allowed to read it.

What does remove it

Google’s guide for a move that changes addresses says to change one thing at a time. Its example of what not to combine is a new domain, a new system and a new layout, done in one go. These are the ways a site actually goes quiet.

The addresses change. /boilers/ becomes /heating-services/ because the new site “has a cleaner structure”. Every old link, including the one Google shows, lands on a page that is not there. The repair is a permanent redirect from each old address to the new one, kept for at least a year. Google says a permanent redirect does not discard the credit of the links pointing at the old address. A tidy folder structure still costs you the year.

The www, the https, and the slash at the end are part of the address. Switching from www.yours.co.uk to yours.co.uk is a move of every page, not a detail.

The domain changes. A new name is a new address for the whole site. It can be done, with redirects and with Search Console’s change-of-address tool, and it is a project of its own. That tool is for a new domain only. It does nothing for a tidier set of folders, and there is nothing to tell it when the domain stays.

The site is off, or hidden. A weekend on a holding page. A preview copy that was marked “don’t index” and then goes live still marked that way. A leftover file from the build that tells Google to stay out. Google’s guide for changing host, which is the guide for a move that keeps the addresses, is mostly this: don’t block the crawler, point the domain, watch.

The titles are all rewritten on the way. “We’ll sort the SEO out while we’re in there.” The titles you have are the ones Google already shows. Better titles are a second project. Write the current ones down, move, and change them later, when you can see what a single new title did.

Pages disappear. The old team page, a post from two years ago, a price list someone linked from an email. The listing goes with the page. Keeping “the important pages” and dropping the rest is a pile of dead addresses. A normal blog can move with every post.

Google also says that any significant change can make rankings move about while it recrawls the site. The wait it describes, a few weeks for a medium-sized site, is the time it takes for new addresses to replace old ones in the results. A move that keeps the addresses skips that wait. Google still comes back and reads the pages. The closer the title and the words are to what it already had, the less there is for the result to do.

Anyone who promises you will not move a single place is selling a feeling. Anyone who promises you will vanish because the pages are no longer built by WordPress is selling one too.

What does not

WordPress itself is not in the listing. Nor is the theme, the host, or the plugin that “does your SEO”, once the titles it wrote are still in the pages. How those titles get there on a WordPress site, and which plugin is the one writing them, is in which plugins you can turn off.

A faster page is a better page to arrive on, especially on a phone. Google uses loading speed as one signal among many, and says a strong score there is not a ticket to the top. There is no single “page experience” lever. Being quicker removes one reason to lose a close call. It does not place you first.

Your email is not the website. Moving one and moving the other are two jobs.

How to look, before anyone moves anything

You don’t need a tool that sells you a score.

  1. Search Google for your business name, and for the job you most want to be found for. Write down which of your pages come up, and the exact address under the blue line. Five is enough. If nothing of yours comes up, the move is not what is hiding you.
  2. If you have Search Console, open Performance and note the pages with the most clicks. That is the list a move has to keep. If you have never set it up, it is free, and it is where Google tells you what it did. It is not a requirement for being listed.
  3. Open each of those addresses. Write down the title in the browser tab.
  4. Open the Maps profile and check the website button. Leave the hours and the reviews alone.
  5. If you are moving it yourself, don’t touch Settings → Permalinks. Saving a different structure there renames every post and page. Take a backup first.

Three questions for whoever does the move, before you agree:

  • Will every current address still open the same page?
  • If one has to change, will there be a permanent redirect, kept for at least a year?
  • Will the titles stay, and will the site stay online while it happens?

“We’ll improve the structure” is the risk. The software is not.

The week after

Give Google time to come back, then look for a cause rather than a mood.

  • The old address opens the same page. Not a “not found”, not a holding page.
  • The browser-tab title is the one you wrote down.
  • In Search Console, the page-indexing report is not suddenly full of not-found addresses. Google’s hosting guide tells you to watch this. If Search Console itself says it can no longer see the site, the verification tag was left behind in the old plugin. That locks you out of the report. It does not take the listing down. Put the tag back.
  • A search for site:yours.co.uk still lists your pages. This is a rough check of what Google has stored, not a ranking.
  • The visitors are still in your statistics. If the analytics snippet was lost in the move, the visits happen and the report shows zero. That feels like dropping off Google. It is a missing counter.

When the move is to Johnny

Johnny keeps every address, so a link and a Google result still name your page. We carry over the titles and descriptions and check them before the switch. The site stays online the whole time. You see the new pages before the domain points at them, and your email is left as it is.

A higher place in Google is not part of that. Pages load faster afterwards, which is a better page to land on, and it is not a ranking trick. A normal blog moves with every post, each post at its old address. An online shop or a members’ area we can’t take yet.

How a move goes: How it works.

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