Website Transition

What to expect for SEO at cutover

We're moving landrydesigns.com onto a faster, modern platform. Here's exactly how the search rankings you've built are protected through the switch — and the few steps left before we go live.

The short version

Your rankings are protected. Here's the whole story at a glance.

✓
Every page keeps its address. Of the 148 pages Google has indexed, 110 sit at the exact same URL and 38 forward with a single permanent redirect. Zero broken links, zero redirect chains. Verified by crawling the live site against the new one.
✓
Anything that moves is redirected. The handful of pages changing address are permanently (301) redirected to their best match, so their SEO value transfers automatically.
✓
Nothing gets hidden from Google. No page is accidentally set to “no-index,” and every page tells Google its correct canonical address.
✓
Titles, descriptions, and rich data carry over. Page titles, meta descriptions, social preview cards, and structured data are all in place on the new site.
✓
The sitemap keeps its current address. A complete, up-to-date sitemap goes live with the new site to help Google recrawl it quickly.

Continuity

Nothing gets lost: the redirects

A small number of older pages are being consolidated into their natural homes on the new site. Each one is set up with a permanent redirect — the search-friendly way to move a page. It forwards visitors and passes the page's ranking strength to the destination.

Current page	New home
Blog category pages — News, Tips, Trends, Staging	→Blog categories hub
Older & placeholder project pages	→Portfolio
A duplicate of the Cedar Hill project write-up	→Cedar Hill Interior Design Transformation
Two in-depth articles (best designers in Texas · best materials for business interiors)	Kept at their own URLspreserved

The two feature articles were important enough to carry over in full rather than redirect — they now live on the new site at the same addresses, so their rankings stay exactly where they are.

Verified today

The sitemap keeps its address

This is the detail that most often goes wrong in a platform move. Google Search Console has one sitemap address on file for this site, and the new build has to answer at that address — not a new one. It does.

Sitemap address	Today (WordPress)	After the move
/sitemap_index.xml	the registered sitemap	same address, same jobunchanged
/sitemap.xml	in use	→redirects to the index
/page-sitemap.xml	58 pages	→redirects to the index
/post-sitemap.xml	82 articles	→redirects to the index
/project-sitemap.xml	4 projects	→redirects to the index
/category-sitemap.xml	6 categories	→redirects to the index
/dipi_testimonial-sitemap.xml /dipi_popup_maker-sitemap.xml	7 plugin URLs	→redirects to the index

Every one of the six sitemap addresses WordPress publishes today continues to answer after the move. Nothing Google has on file becomes a dead end, and the Sitemap: line in robots.txt still points where it always did.

The new sitemap lists 119 pages rather than 157. That is deliberate: the 157 includes 7 plugin-generated URLs for testimonials and pop-ups that were never real pages, 6 thin category archives, and the project pages being consolidated into the portfolio. Everything with traffic or links is in the new sitemap.

Looking ahead

Built to be found by AI search too

A growing share of the people looking for an interior designer now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews or Claude instead of typing a query and scanning ten blue links. Those systems read a site differently from a traditional crawler — they lean heavily on structured data and on clean, machine-readable markup. That is a place this rebuild is genuinely stronger than the WordPress site.

✓AI crawlers welcomed, not blocked

GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and CCBot are all explicitly allowed. Many sites block these by default and quietly disappear from AI answers.

✓Local business data on every city page

Each location page carries full InteriorDesigner schema with address, coordinates, service and city — the exact structured facts an AI needs to name a designer for a given town.

✓Breadcrumbs and article markup

BreadcrumbList and BlogPosting data on articles, so an AI can tell what a page is, who wrote it and where it sits in the site.

✓A far higher content-to-code ratio

38KB of clean semantic HTML instead of 240KB of page-builder markup. Less noise for a language model to read through means the actual content carries more weight.

✓Server-rendered, not assembled in the browser

Every page arrives as finished HTML. Some AI crawlers do not run JavaScript at all, and a page they cannot read is a page they cannot cite.

✓Instant change notification

IndexNow tells search engines the moment a page changes, rather than waiting to be crawled.

Preserved

What carries over, unchanged

✓URL structure

The overwhelming majority of pages keep their exact web address.

✓Indexing

Every page stays visible to search engines — nothing blocked.

✓Canonical tags

Each page points Google to its correct, permanent address.

✓Titles & descriptions

Search-result titles and meta descriptions are all present.

✓Social & rich results

Open Graph preview cards and structured data are in place.

✓Sitemap & robots

The address Google already has on file keeps working, listing the new pages.

The upside

What the move unlocks

Protecting the rankings is the floor, not the ceiling. Here's the part that's easy to miss: a great SEO plugin like RankMath optimizes within WordPress's limits — it can't remove them. Moving off WordPress removes the limits themselves, which opens up a handful of things that simply aren't possible on the old platform, no matter how well it's tuned.

≈6×

lighter homepage — roughly 240KB of page code down to 38KB

35 → 3

stylesheets loaded — far less render-blocking code to slow the page down

A speed tier no plugin can reach

RankMath can measure Core Web Vitals; it can't make WordPress and Divi ship a 38KB page. This architecture hits the load and interaction scores Google rewards — especially on mobile — that the old platform structurally can't, however it's tuned.

We shape the whole page, not just the tags

A plugin controls the head tags. We control the actual HTML: clean semantic markup, a far higher content-to-code ratio, and precisely the schema we want — signals Google reads that a plugin can't reach inside a page builder.

Programmatic SEO at scale

Titles, local-business schema, internal links, and page structure are generated from data — so we can add or fine-tune dozens of location pages consistently in a single change, instead of building and tagging each one by hand.

AI a plugin doesn't have

Our SEO workspace writes alt text by actually looking at each image, and drafts title and heading improvements we review and deploy live in one click. RankMath scores your content; it doesn't see your images or ship the fix.

SEO as version-controlled code

Every tag and redirect lives in code — atomic, reviewable, instantly reversible, and impossible for a plugin update or a WordPress core release to silently break. A database of plugin settings can't promise that.

Built on the edge

Instant global delivery, edge-level redirects, and instant search-engine notification (IndexNow) live in the infrastructure itself — not bolted on as a plugin that can slow the very site it's meant to help.

Before go-live

The final checklist

A few polishing steps remain before we flip the switch — none of them affect the protections above.

Final copy review

A quick pass over page titles and headings to make sure the strongest local-search wording is retained on every page.

Two city pages refreshed

The Fort Worth and Southlake pages are getting a content refresh so they're as rich as the rest of the location pages.

Go live & submit the sitemap

Once we flip the site over, we resubmit the sitemap at its existing address in Google Search Console so Google recrawls everything promptly.

At cutover

The proactive steps we take to speed recovery

The moment we flip the switch, we don't just wait for Google to notice — we actively signal the change so the new site is recrawled as quickly as possible.

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Redirects go live with the switch

Every changed URL forwards to its new home from the first second, so no visitor or search engine ever hits a dead end.

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Re-submit the sitemap in Google Search Console

The sitemap lives at the same address Search Console already tracks, so re-submitting simply tells Google to take a fresh look at a map it already knows.

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Fast-track the priority pages for indexing

Using Search Console's URL Inspection tool, we request immediate indexing for the pages that matter most — the homepage, top service and location pages, and key articles — which typically get recrawled within a day or two.

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Notify the other search engines instantly

Beyond Google, we ping Bing and other engines the moment the site changes via the IndexNow protocol, so they update quickly too.

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Watch and confirm

We monitor Search Console's coverage and crawl activity daily through the first week or two and act on anything that needs attention.

After go-live

What to watch, and for how long

A small, short-lived wobble in rankings right after a platform move is completely normal — Google takes a week or two to recrawl and settle. With the redirects, canonicals, and sitemap all handled up front, we expect the site to hold its positions and settle back quickly. We'll be watching Search Console coverage through the transition and will flag anything that needs attention.

If there's anything you'd like verified from your side — a particular ranking page, a set of backlinks, a campaign landing URL — send it over and we'll confirm it's mapped correctly before we go live. The goal is a switch your traffic never feels.