Guide
Changing orthodontic website companies without losing your search rankings
Most practices stay with a website company they have outgrown for one reason: the fear that moving will undo years of search results. That fear is reasonable and the risk is real, but it is entirely manageable. Here is what actually protects your rankings, and the order to do it in.
First, find out what you own
Before you talk to anyone new, answer three questions in writing.
Who is the registrant of your domain? Look it up rather than asking. If your vendor is listed, your entire online presence sits in someone else's name, and that is the first thing to fix regardless of whether you move.
Can the content be exported? Text, images, treatment pages and blog posts. Some platforms have no export at all, which means a rebuild rather than a migration. That is survivable but changes the timeline.
Who owns the Google Business Profile, the Google Analytics property and the Search Console property? These are frequently created under an agency account, and losing them means losing your review history, your historical data and your verified listing. Ask to be made a primary owner of each today, not on the way out.
Rankings live on URLs, not on websites
This is the single idea that makes migrations safe. Google does not rank your practice. It ranks each page, and each page's authority is attached to its exact address. When a new site changes /invisalign-treatment to /treatments/clear-aligners and nothing tells Google the two are the same page, the years of authority on the old address are simply dropped.
The fix is unglamorous and completely reliable: a one-to-one permanent redirect from every old URL to its closest match on the new site. Every one. Not a blanket redirect to the homepage, which Google treats as a soft error and ignores.
The redirect map, in plain terms
Before the new site goes live, someone crawls the old one and produces a list of every address it publishes. Every one of those gets a destination on the new site. Where a page has no equivalent, it points at the nearest relevant page rather than the homepage. The list is checked after launch, address by address, to confirm each one lands where it should.
Ask any prospective vendor to show you a redirect map from a previous migration. A company that does this routinely will have one ready. A company that has to ask what you mean is telling you something.
Keep the domain, always
Moving to a new domain is the one decision that genuinely costs rankings, and it is almost never necessary. If your current address is fine, keep it. If you are rebranding anyway, accept that you are taking a real hit and plan the extra work: redirects at the domain level, updating every directory listing, and several months of patience.
Do not lose your content depth
A common and quiet failure: the new site looks beautiful and has a third of the words. A page that ranked because it answered fifteen patient questions now has a hero image and two sentences, and it stops ranking. Design is not a substitute for substance.
Before the rebuild, note which pages bring in traffic. Search Console will tell you in two minutes. Those pages must survive with their depth intact, improved rather than trimmed.
The order that works
- Take ownership of the domain, analytics, Search Console and Business Profile while the relationship is still calm.
- Export or document everything: content, images, forms, anything patient facing.
- Record a baseline. Search Console clicks and impressions for the last twelve months, so you can prove what happened either way.
- Build the new site in full, with the redirect map prepared in advance.
- Switch on a quiet day, redirects live from the first minute.
- Resubmit the sitemap, request indexing on the main pages, and watch Search Console daily for two weeks.
- Give it three months before judging. Some fluctuation in the first fortnight is normal and not a sign of failure.
Notice periods and the awkward conversation
Read the termination clause before you start. Many orthodontic website contracts renew automatically and require notice a set period before renewal, so the practical first step is often a calendar reminder rather than an email. You do not need to explain yourself, and you do not need your old vendor's cooperation to migrate, only the assets you already own.
If your agreement makes leaving genuinely difficult, that is worth knowing now, and it is worth remembering when you sign the next one.
What good looks like
- Your domain, in your name, before anything else happens.
- A one-to-one redirect for every old URL, checked after launch.
- Content depth maintained or improved, never trimmed for looks.
- Analytics and Search Console history carried forward, not restarted.
- Your Business Profile and reviews connected to the new site on day one.
- A baseline recorded beforehand, so the result is measurable rather than a matter of opinion.
Hey32 includes migration in every launch: the redirect map, the domain, the Business Profile and reviews, and the analytics history. You can read exactly what a launch includes on the pricing page, see how the sites are structured in orthodontic website design, or read the ten questions to ask before you sign with your next vendor.