WordPress to Astro Migration: What to Expect

The number one question I get before a migration starts is some version of: “will I lose my Google rankings?”

The short answer is no, if we do it properly. The longer answer is below, along with an honest account of what a WordPress to Astro migration actually looks like from start to finish — the timeline, what happens at each stage, and what can go wrong.

Stage one: Audit (1–2 days)

Before anything gets built, I crawl your existing site. Every page, every URL, every piece of content gets logged.

What usually comes out of this surprises people. Most sites have significant amounts of dead weight — old service pages that never ranked, blog posts from 2017 that no longer reflect the business, duplicate content from plugin shenanigans. The audit tells us what is worth migrating and what can quietly disappear.

You will also get a full URL map at this stage: old URL to new URL, one-to-one. This is the document that keeps your Google rankings intact.

Stage two: Design (3–7 days)

The new site is built from scratch. Not from a theme, not from a template. From components.

This is where the real difference from WordPress shows up. Instead of fighting a theme to look the way you want, we design exactly what you need and build it cleanly. You review it before a single line goes live.

For most small business sites this stage is where the biggest visible improvement happens. The new site looks more considered than the old one, because it was designed for the business specifically rather than adapted from something generic.

Stage three: Migration (2–5 days)

Content moves across — pages, posts, images, forms. Every URL from the audit gets a 301 redirect pointing to the right place on the new site.

The 301 redirect step is non-negotiable. It tells Google and every other search engine that your content has moved permanently, and that any ranking authority the old URL had should transfer to the new one. Without it, you are effectively starting your SEO from zero.

If you have a large blog archive, I write scripts to automate the bulk of the content migration. The final pass is always manual to make sure everything renders correctly.

Stage four: Launch (1 day)

DNS cutover takes minutes. The old site stays live in parallel for 48 hours as a safety net while we monitor for anything unexpected.

From launch day I watch the server logs closely for 404 errors — pages that were not caught in the URL mapping, old links from other sites pointing somewhere that no longer exists. Any that appear get redirected immediately.

What happens to your Google rankings

Weeks 1 and 2 post-launch you will usually see some volatility as Google re-crawls your site. This is normal and expected. The bot is working through your redirects and re-indexing your pages in their new location.

By week 3 or 4 things typically settle, and most clients see their positions return to where they were. The performance improvement (Core Web Vitals going from red to green) often produces a modest rankings lift within the first month.

The key variables are: how complete the URL mapping was, whether the redirect chain is clean (no double redirects), and whether the new site structure makes sense to a crawler. If all three are handled properly, the transition is smooth.

A few things that can go wrong

Missing redirects. If a URL was not in the audit, it will not get a redirect. This is why the audit stage matters. A thorough crawl at the start catches things that would otherwise show up as 404s in Google Search Console three months later.

Images not migrated. WordPress stores images in a specific directory structure. If the migration script does not account for this, image URLs break. Every image needs to be checked post-launch.

Third-party embeds. If you have contact forms via a plugin, booking systems, or embedded tools, these need to be rebuilt natively in the new site. They do not migrate automatically.

Common questions

Will the new site look completely different? It can, or it can be a faithful reproduction of the existing design with better code underneath. Most clients want the latter with refinements. The choice is yours.

Can I edit the site myself after launch? Yes. I can set up a lightweight CMS (Decap or Keystatic) that gives you an edit interface for pages and blog posts. No code needed.

How much does a migration cost? Project builds including migrations run from £3,950 to £7,500 depending on the size of the site. Get a quote at /astro-migration.