Hello,
I am in the need of doing a lot of changes to the website of us. Since the plugins are not upgradable anymore and we need to switch to PHP 8.x ,we are forced to change some sites that were using the plugin so we can deactivate them and continue with the upgrade to PHP 8.x.
My idea was to replicate the complete site and the DB and perform all the needing changes in that replicated Site. Once we would be happy with everything, I would change the internal pointer of the domain to the new internal location of the htdocs.
I know this works, but were I need advice is regarding SEO and Google indexation. If I am not chaning any site structure, but only the content (maybe + css, + JS), could that break the current Google index and the ranking that we are having, after changing the link of the domain to another folder?
Thx for the feedback. If you have some docs that help me understand this better, I would say THANK YOU!
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After making such changes (while maintaining the same permalinks), the SEO impact is typically temporary: although it may take Google some time to adapt to the modifications, substantial drops in rankings are unlikely if you follow the best practices.
Activate the “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” option in the WordPress dashboard to avoid potential content duplication. This is important because it can impact the rankings on search engines.
It’s important to update internal links on the new site during/after migration to ensure they don’t break on the new site. Also, connecting the new site with the Google Search Console and requesting a recrawl will help expedite its indexing ([https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-ask-google-to-recrawl-urls-of-your-wordpress-site/](https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-ask-google-to-recrawl-urls-of-your-wordpress-site/)). We had one client recently that Google wasn’t indexing the site for some longer period of time, but we “pushed it” also with this plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/indexnow/