What Happens to Your Google Rankings When You Move From WordPress to EmDash

The short answer

Google ranks pages, and it knows each page by its address. Moving from WordPress to EmDash replaces the software behind your site. Your domain stays the same. If each page keeps its URL, or sends visitors to its new one with a permanent (301) redirect, its rankings follow it.

Google's own guidance on site moves says permanent redirects don't cost a page its PageRank, and that rankings can wobble for a few weeks while Google recrawls. When a move does lose rankings, it's almost always something specific: a page that stopped loading, a title that changed, or a setting left on from testing. Each of those can be checked before the switch.

We moved webnetic.dev from WordPress to EmDash at the end of September 2026. Everything below comes from that move.

Start with every address Google knows

The obvious list of pages to move is your sitemap. It isn't the whole list.

Our move missed an old post about what a small business website costs. It wasn't in WordPress's sitemap or in the export file we moved from, so it never came across. Google hadn't forgotten it. Search Console showed it in results 1,316 times in the three months to early October, for searches like "small business website cost", and after the switch it returned a 404.

We found it in the first Search Console export after the move and redirected it to our new website cost guide the same day. The lesson stuck: your sitemap is what your site says exists, and Search Console's Pages and Performance reports are what Google thinks exists. Every move now starts by merging both lists.

Keep the address, or redirect it

EmDash lets us set the address pattern for each type of content, so pages, posts and portfolio projects kept the URLs they had on WordPress. Most moves need very few redirects for that reason.

When a page is retired, it gets a 301 to the closest replacement. A portfolio project we no longer show now points at the portfolio page. Sending everything to the homepage instead is a common shortcut, and Google tends to treat a redirect to an unrelated page as if the page were simply gone.

Links inside your own content need the same care. One of our posts still linked to two addresses from an older WordPress setup that no longer existed. We fixed the links themselves rather than leaning on redirects. EmDash also logs every 404 and counts hits on each redirect, so after launch we can see which old addresses people still arrive at.

Carry titles and descriptions over from the live pages

Your WordPress export file is the wrong place to get your SEO titles from. Plugins like Rank Math build many titles from templates that never appear in the export. Our file carried 22 meta descriptions while the live site actually served 23, and its titles were full of placeholder codes like %sitename%.

So we copy each title and description from the page Google is actually reading: the live site's rendered code. Nothing that ranks changes wording during the move. Pages that never had a description get one written from their own copy.

Rewrites wait until afterwards, as their own change. We improved several of our titles in the days after the switch, separately, so that if a ranking moved we'd know which change caused it.

Check the new site's code before the domain moves

The problems that cost rankings rarely show on the page. On our own build, testing caught two:

• Every address in the new sitemap pointed at a URL that didn't exist, /posts/post-name instead of /post-name/. All 41 of them.
• The homepage answered at two addresses, / and /home, and each one told Google it was the original.

Neither showed on any page a visitor would see, and both were fixed before launch. We also compare every page's status, title, description and canonical tag between the old site and the new one before the switch, page by page.

Switch off the staging block

While a new site is being built, every page carries a noindex tag so Google doesn't index a half-finished copy. On EmDash that's a setting on each page, and it doesn't clear itself at launch. Leave it on and your pages start dropping out of Google as it recrawls them.

It's the last thing we check before the domain moves, along with the Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster verification on the new site, so the reports keep running through the switch.

What we watch afterwards

On launch day the new sitemap goes into Search Console. For the next month we watch its Pages report for new 404s and compare the searches each page appears for against the weeks before.

We ran the same checks on our own site. In the first week after the switch, Google showed our pages in search at least as often as in the two weeks before, and the one missing page that mattered was the cost post above.

What EmDash does differently

There's no SEO plugin to carry across. EmDash has title, description and indexing fields built into every page, a sitemap built in, and one business record that feeds the structured data Google and AI assistants read. Your Yoast or Rank Math settings don't transfer as settings, which is why the titles get copied over by hand from the live pages.

If you'd like this done for you, our free WordPress to EmDash migration covers every step above on any monthly plan. You can see why we moved our own site, or look at the sites we build on EmDash.

Frequently asked questions

How long does it take rankings to settle after a move?

Google's site-move guidance puts it at a few weeks or more for a medium-sized site. When the addresses don't change, there's less for Google to work through. We watch Search Console for at least a month after every move.

How long should the redirects stay in place?

Google recommends at least a year. We leave them in place indefinitely, since a redirect costs nothing to keep and old links to your site can surface years later.

Will my Yoast or Rank Math settings come across?

Not as settings. EmDash has its own SEO fields on every page, so we copy each title and description from your live site into them before the switch.

Should I change my domain at the same time?

We'd advise against it. A new domain is a second move layered on the first, and if rankings dip you won't know which one caused it. Move the platform first and change the domain later if you still want to.