If rankings fall after a WordPress migration, compare the old landing pages with their intended replacements before rewriting content or submitting every URL again. A migration can cause temporary search fluctuations, but missing redirects, staging directives, and changed page content need active repair.
Separate Search Loss From Measurement Loss
Compare Search Console clicks and impressions with your analytics report. If Search Console clicks remain similar but analytics sessions collapse, investigate the analytics installation, consent behavior, or property configuration first. That does not prove the site's rankings disappeared.
Use comparable date windows and the same search type. Record the migration date, affected devices, countries, and page groups. Google's traffic-drop guidance recommends looking for patterns rather than relying only on site-wide averages.
Build a Small High-Value URL Sample
Select former search landing pages with clicks, important service pages, and several examples from each changed template. Pair each old URL with its intended new URL using the redirect map. Keep the query family beside the pair so you can judge whether the replacement still answers the same need.
Do not merge old and new URL performance by guesswork. Check both properties when the domain changed, and be clear about which report contains which host. Preserve the pre-migration exports if they are available.
Check the Response Before the SEO Plugin
For a public URL you own, this command follows redirects and prints response headers while discarding the page body. Replace the example address.
curl -sS -L --max-time 20 -D - -o /dev/null 'https://old.example.com/service'
Read each Location header and the final status. Then open the destination and inspect its actual content. A redirect to the homepage or an empty application shell is not an equivalent replacement simply because it returns 200.
Check whether the new page has a self-consistent canonical, is free of unintended noindex directives, and can load its important resources. A robots.txt block and a noindex instruction are different controls; blocking a page can prevent a crawler from seeing its noindex directive.
Test sheet for rankings dropped after a wordpress migration. Record your own evidence.
Compare the Content That Moved
Look for lost headings, missing service details, broken images, removed internal links, and changed language targeting. Review both the delivered HTML and the rendered page when JavaScript is involved. Fix a template-level omission once, then test several affected URLs rather than editing every page independently.
Use URL Inspection for representative old and new pages. Record Google's selected canonical and the last crawl information, keeping the indexed view separate from the live test. A successful live test does not mean Google has reprocessed the migration.
Repair Confirmed Faults, Then Measure Again
Google's site-move documentation explains why recrawling and reindexing take time. There is no guaranteed recovery date. Keep valid redirects in place, update internal links to final destinations, and submit a sitemap containing the intended canonical URLs.
Record each material fix and compare a later complete reporting window. Do not change URLs again out of impatience. If you find a routing fault, the HTTPS redirect guide or HandL WP migration diagnosis can help isolate it before further changes confuse the evidence.
References checked September 28, 2026. Diagrams and worked examples are explanatory, not customer measurements.