What happens to SEO when a dealership changes website providers?

Get the URL inventory before you sign

Export every indexable URL on the current site with its traffic and conversions. That list is the acceptance test for the new build. Without it you cannot prove what was lost, and the new provider cannot be held to preserving it.

Redirects are a deliverable, not a courtesy

Require a one-to-one redirect map for every retired URL, in the contract, with a deadline. Blanket redirects to the homepage are treated as soft errors and lose the equity you are trying to keep.

Content and structured data travel with the pages

Pages that ranked did so on their content. Confirm the new platform reproduces the body content, headings, titles and structured data rather than replacing them with template output.

Keep the measurement

Retain access to analytics and search-console history and confirm ownership of both accounts before the switch. Losing the baseline means you cannot tell a seasonal dip from a migration failure.

What usually goes wrong

Typical causes of a drop are missing redirects, changed URL patterns, lost page titles and descriptions, blocked crawling on the new site left over from testing, slower pages, and inventory pages that render differently. Any single change may seem minor, but several together can remove pages from search results. A staged checklist and a comparison of the old and new sites before launch catches most of them.

Checks in the first weeks

After launch, crawl the new site and compare it with the old inventory of URLs. Confirm redirects return the correct status, check that the site can be crawled, submit a fresh sitemap, and watch impressions, clicks and indexed pages in Search Console.

Compare lead volume with the same weeks of earlier years. Note any pages that lose visibility and fix them individually and promptly.

Common mistakes in provider changes

Launching in the busiest sales week, leaving development blocks in place, redirecting everything to the homepage and forgetting analytics tags are the frequent errors. Another is not agreeing who is responsible for post-launch fixes. Put the checks, the owner and the timeline in the contract, and keep the old site available for reference until the new one is verified.