How to migrate from WordPress to HubSpot without losing your rankings

Why migrations lose traffic

Google ranks pages, not websites. When a page moves to a new address without a redirect, Google treats the old one as gone and the new one as a stranger, and the rankings, links and history the old page earned stay behind. Most traffic drops after a migration come down to three things:

• URLs that changed without a 301 redirect. WordPress often uses dates or categories in post URLs; HubSpot uses its own blog path. Every difference needs a redirect.
• Content that got thinner. A long service page rebuilt as a short, nicer-looking one loses the text it was ranking for.
• Lost metadata. Page titles, meta descriptions, image alt texts and canonical tags that a WordPress SEO plugin handled quietly, and that nobody copied over.

None of these are HubSpot problems. They happen on any platform change, and they’re all preventable with a plan made before the build starts.

Step 1: Audit what you have

Crawl the current site and export every URL that returns a page: pages, blog posts, landing pages, PDFs, category and tag archives. A crawler such as Screaming Frog does this in minutes. Then add two columns from Google Search Console for the last 12 months: clicks and the number of linking sites, if you have them.

This list is the backbone of the whole project. It tells you which pages earn traffic and links (move carefully, keep the content), which ones nobody visits (candidates to merge or drop) and how many redirects you’ll need.

Don’t skip PDFs and old campaign pages. They often carry links from other sites, and they’re the URLs most often forgotten.

Step 2: Decide what moves, merges or goes

For each URL, choose one of three outcomes:

• Move: the page comes over with its content and, ideally, the same URL.
• Merge: two or three thin pages on the same topic become one stronger page. The old URLs redirect to it.
• Remove: the page has no traffic, no links and no purpose. Redirect it to the closest relevant page, or let it return a 404 if nothing is close.

Avoid redirecting everything you remove to the home page. Google tends to treat those as soft 404s, so they pass nothing on, and visitors who followed a specific link land somewhere that doesn’t answer their question.

Step 3: Map every old URL to a new one

Write the redirect map as a spreadsheet: old path in one column, new path in the other. Keep URLs identical wherever HubSpot allows it. Website pages in HubSpot can use almost any path, so /services/seo can stay /services/seo.

The blog is where paths usually change. A WordPress post at /2023/05/my-post/ will live at something like /blog/my-post in HubSpot. That’s fine, as long as every post gets its redirect.

HubSpot’s URL redirects tool, in the Domains & URLs settings, accepts a CSV import, so the spreadsheet becomes the redirects in one upload. It also supports flexible pattern redirects, which handle whole groups such as dated blog URLs with one rule.

Step 4: Rebuild the templates and modules

WordPress themes don’t move to HubSpot: the templates are rebuilt as a HubSpot theme with modules. This is the step where a migration becomes an improvement instead of a copy. Two routes:

• A Marketplace theme, customized to your brand. Faster and cheaper, and a good fit when your pages follow common patterns.
• A custom theme, built around how you sell. Worth it when the site is a main sales channel, or when your marketing team builds a lot of pages and needs modules that fit exactly.

Either way, make a list of every page type you found in the audit (service page, case study, blog post, landing page, pricing) and make sure each one has a template before content goes in. We’ve written separately about building modules your marketing team can’t break.

Step 5: Move the content and the SEO details

Copy the text over as it is, then improve it, not the other way round. For each page, carry over:

• The page title and meta description, from Yoast, Rank Math or whichever SEO plugin you used
• The H1 and the heading structure
• Image alt texts
• Internal links, updated to the new URLs so they don’t run through redirects
• Structured data the plugin added, such as article or FAQ markup. See how to add schema markup in HubSpot.

Forms are worth a separate pass. WordPress forms usually send an email; HubSpot forms create contacts in the CRM. Decide which properties each form fills in and which workflow follows it, so leads don’t land in a black hole on launch day.

Step 6: Launch, then check

Launch with the redirects already uploaded and the domain connected in HubSpot, so there is no moment when old URLs return errors. Then work through this list:

1. Crawl the old URL list against the live site: every one should return a 200 or a single 301 to a 200, never a chain of redirects or a 404.
2. Submit the new XML sitemap in Google Search Console and in Bing Webmaster Tools.
3. Check that no page is accidentally set to noindex, a common leftover from staging.
4. Test every form end to end, including the notification and the contact record it creates.
5. Watch the Search Console coverage and performance reports daily for two weeks, then weekly for two months.

What to keep an eye on afterwards

Rankings usually wobble for a week or two while Google recrawls, then settle. If a page doesn’t recover, compare it with its old version: a missing redirect, a changed title or a shorter text explains nearly every case. Keep the old crawl and the redirect map. They’re the first thing you’ll want if a question comes up six months later.