How to move your therapy website without losing your Google rankings

Every month, therapists tell us the same horror story: they redesigned or moved their website, and their inquiries fell off a cliff. The site looked better. The phone stopped ringing. What happened?

Rankings don't live in your website's design — they live in its URLs, its content, and the links pointing at both. Change those carelessly and Google treats your practice like a brand-new site. Here's the migration checklist we run on every move.

1. Inventory what you're about to risk

Before touching anything, export every URL on your current site and note which ones actually earn traffic. Google Search Console (free) shows exactly which pages rank and for what. Typically a therapy site's value concentrates in a handful of pages: the homepage, two or three service pages, and one or two articles that quietly rank for condition searches.

The rule: you cannot preserve what you haven't measured. Take the inventory first, always.

Every old URL gets exactly one permanent redirect to its new home — never a blanket redirect to the homepage.

2. Map every old URL to a new one

The single biggest migration killer is broken URLs. If your anxiety-therapy page lived at /anxiety and now lives at /services/anxiety-therapy, Google needs a 301 redirect telling it the page moved permanently. One-to-one, page to page — not everything dumped onto the new homepage, which search engines treat as a soft error.

3. Keep the content that ranks

Redesigns tempt you to rewrite everything. Resist — at first. If a page ranks, its content is why. Move it substantially intact, launch, confirm rankings held, and improve it afterwards in measured steps.

4. Watch the technical details

Page titles and meta descriptions — carry them over; they're ranking signals.
Site speed — the new site should be faster, not prettier-but-heavier.
Mobile rendering — most therapy searches happen on phones.
Schema markup — re-implement your LocalBusiness and FAQ structured data.

5. Update everything that points at you

Your Google Business Profile, Psychology Today profile, directory listings and social bios all link to your site. If URLs changed, update them — consistent citations are a local-SEO ranking factor for practices.

6. Monitor for 60 days

Some ranking wobble in the first two weeks is normal. What you're watching for in Search Console: crawl errors, pages dropping out of the index, and impressions that fall and stay fallen. Caught early, almost everything is fixable.

The short version: inventory, redirect one-to-one, keep ranking content intact, update citations, monitor. Skip any step and you're gambling your caseload pipeline on luck.