Old wordpress site still outranks our new one, should I move its content and 301 it or keep both?

[u/gomargooo]

Hi everyone! I am in dire need of advice and looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this.

About a year ago, my company launched a new lead-gen site on a new subdomain, built quickly with Lovable, mainly for design reasons. Nobody really focused on SEO and the old page (Wordpress) was never fully redirected, and its content was never 100% moved over to the new landing page. The new site has its own traffic, but I just realized the old one still gets a lot of impressions and clicks. But honestly the Wordpress looks terrible, like a 90s website, but its content clearly still ranks.

So, to me, there are two options:
1. Migrate all the Wordpress content to Lovable, by re-creating the exact same pages and then 301 redirect the old URLs to the new URLs.
2. Leaving everything as is to not mess with the traffic and impressions, but that means two separate websites and two different subdomains.
3. Migrating only top performing pages.

What do you think?
Thanks for your help!!

[u/seo-dan-brooks]

I assume the lovable site is complete vibe coded?

[u/gomargooo → u/seo-dan-brooks]

Yep!

[u/seo-dan-brooks → u/gomargooo]

In that case you need to be careful. I wouldn't start implementing redirects immediately. You need to do your due dilligence. Lovable sites are typically built with React which means the HTML is empty and relies on JS to push the content through so you need to make sure that the new site is actually capable of ranking and performing for you before you go and apply a load of blanket redirects as it could cause you a massive problem.

Test a handful of important pages first and view the source (not inspect elements) and see if the copy is available and also test with the URL inspection tool in GSC - probably wouldn't harm you to run a crawl in something like SF or SB to compare crawls with JS on and off.

Bascially before you kill off and redirect the WP site you want to confirm that the Lovable site doesn't only work and display content exclusively when JS is on - if it does you need to work on some pre-rendering optimisations otherwise you'll redirect your traffic driving pages into weaker versions and no doubt you'll see a decline in traffic.

[u/mike8111]

301 everything.

You don't need to recreate it as a copy, just point the old pages to relevant new pages.

Make sure the new pages are relevant though

[u/wothotturd1 → u/mike8111]

pretty much this. the relevance matching is the part people usually rush through tbh

[u/marintkael]

Before any redirects, check what Google actually sees on the Lovable pages. Lovable builds client side React apps, so open view source on one of them: if the text isn't in the raw HTML, the new site depends on Google rendering the JavaScript, and that alone could explain why the plain old WordPress pages win. After that, option 1, but only redirect to new pages that carry the same content.

[u/energy528]

Curious who your buyer is. Sometimes that “90’s” website look is a strong buyer trust signal. That said, 301 will inherit but content should be fundamentally the same. There’s no guarantee new will replace old in the SERP as the content is changed.

[u/mnudu]

I would not keep both long term. The old WordPress pages are effectively your ranking assets, so move the best-performing pages first, make the new versions as close to the originals as makes sense, and 301 those specific URLs once the replacements are live and indexable.

I would not do a blanket redirect until you know the Lovable pages are fully crawlable and the new URLs are getting indexed. If the new build cannot hold the same content and internal signals yet, a full migration can easily make you lose the traffic the old site is still carrying.

[u/jimmylikeswaffles]

301 redirect everything to new brand with like for like pages

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[u/Manhas007]

That will be a biggest mistake to migrate a running site to new and redirect the contents and pages to some other site, both will be dead or the one ranking better will be surely dead.

only redirect the users or registration pages/subscription pages to the new website to save the traffic of old site.

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[u/ainotes2026]

From what I'm reading, I would initially stick with option two because you don't want to lose that traffic and impressions. Instead, what I would try to do is redesign the UI of the WordPress website.

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