How to preserve SEO when you import a site
Last updated June 3, 2026
When you rebuild your site with Repaint, you can keep all of your existing SEO traffic. But it isn't automatic. A rebuild is a site migration, and like any migration, your rankings only carry over if you take a few precautions. This article explains what matters and how to do it.
How website migrations affect 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, you give search engines what they already trust: the same content, on the same URL.
So your content and your URLs are what matter most. Keep a page's text, headings, and titles at the same path, and search engines treat it as the same page. Change the content drastically, or change the URL without a redirect, and the page can lose its ranking.
How to preserve SEO with Repaint
- Rebuild your site. Import your existing site into Repaint first. Follow general onboarding, or learn how to import a website.
- Review your URLs. Have Repaint check that your new page paths match the old ones. If a path doesn't match, you can ask it to add a redirect from the old URL to the new one, so no link or ranking is lost.
- Review your key content. Have Repaint check that content matches between your new and old pages: titles, meta descriptions, headlines, and body text. The closer these stay to what already ranks, the more your traffic holds.
- Run a technical SEO audit. Ask Repaint to audit the site and fix the technical basics. It knows how to apply best practices like unique page titles and descriptions, a clean heading structure, image alt text, canonical tags, a sitemap and robots.txt, and structured data for your pages and posts.
What to expect 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. Make sure 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.