How to preserve SEO when you import a site
Last updated September 28, 2026
When you rebuild your site with Repaint, you can keep all of your existing SEO traffic. But it isn't automatic. Like any time you move a website, your rankings only carry over if you take a few precautions.
How switching affects SEO
Search engines rank individual pages, not whole sites. Each page earns its ranking from its content and the authority it has built up at a specific URL. To keep that ranking on a new site, the new page needs to give search engines what they already trust. That means the same content on the same URL.
So your content and your URLs are what matter most. If a page keeps its content at the same path, search engines treat it as the same page. If you change the content drastically or move the URL without a redirect, the page can lose its ranking.
Preserving your SEO
- Rebuild your site. The first step is to import your existing site into Repaint.
- Review your URLs. Repaint can check that your new page paths match the old ones. If one doesn't match, it can add a redirect from the old URL to the new one, so no link or ranking is lost.
- Review your key content. Repaint can check that your titles, headlines, and body text match between your old and new pages. The closer these stay to what already ranks, the more your traffic holds.
- Run a technical SEO audit. Repaint can audit the site and fix the technical basics. It knows the best practices, including page titles, meta descriptions, canonical tags, sitemaps, and structured data.
- Switch your domain. When everything checks out, you can publish and connect your domain so your new site is served at the same address.
“Compare every page on my old site with my new Repaint site. Make sure the URLs match, and add redirects for any that changed.”
After you switch
If you put the same content on the same URLs, your search traffic shouldn't change much before and after the switch. Small, temporary fluctuations are normal as search engines recrawl your site, and they usually settle on their own.
If a specific page drops suddenly, that's your signal to check it. It's worth checking that it still has the same content on the same path, and that any changed URL has a redirect in place. Most ranking losses after a migration trace back to a page whose content or URL quietly changed. Optimizing your SEO covers tracking and improving your rankings in more detail.