On September 16, 2026, the day www.gulfshoresrvrentals.com moved off Wix, I saved 92 days of its Search Console data into the repo. The homepage had 873 of the site’s 923 clicks, which is 94.6%.
The site belongs to a client, a family-owned travel trailer rental business in Foley, Alabama. I rebuilt it in Next.js with Claude Code. This is Part 1: the baseline, what it told me to protect, and the decisions it forced on cutover day. Part 2 needs the 28-day after numbers, and I do not have that Search Console pull yet.
What was in the Search Console export?
It is the URL-prefix property for https://www.gulfshoresrvrentals.com/, web search only, June 15 to September 14, 2026. That is 92 daily rows. Search Console lags a couple of days, so September 14 was the last full day available.
I summed the daily chart myself rather than trusting the note in the folder. It came to 923 clicks and 23,470 impressions, a 3.9% click-through rate. The device and country tables sum to the same 923.
| Measure (Jun 15 to Sep 14, 2026) | Value |
|---|---|
| Clicks | 923 |
| Impressions | 23,470 |
| Homepage clicks | 873 (94.6%) |
| Homepage impressions | 19,163 (81.6%) |
| Other URLs in the pages table | 34, with 56 clicks between them |
| Mobile clicks | 784, at average position 7.6 |
| Desktop clicks | 126, at average position 20.4 |
| Clicks visible in the 1,000-row query table | 411 (44.5%) |
The pages table adds up to 929 clicks, six more than the chart. Search Console counts by page and by property in different ways, so the two totals rarely match. Even against 929, the homepage holds 94.0%.
Only 13 of the other 34 URLs earned a click at all. The best of them was one camper page, with 15. Several pages had thousands of impressions at average positions near 5 and almost no clicks: /delivery had 2 clicks from 2,914 impressions. I suspect many of those impressions came from the homepage’s own result, but the export cannot prove that.
Which URL do you check first when you move a site?
The one carrying the clicks, and you find it before the move, not after. Google’s site move guide says “Start with your important URLs.” It also says to consider “prioritizing your efforts by the number of inbound visits for each link.”
On this site that advice collapses to a single URL. If the homepage had broken on cutover day, 94.6% of search clicks would have gone with it. If all 34 other URLs had broken together, the pages table says about 56 clicks in three months were at stake.
So the homepage got checked field by field against the cached Wix HTML in migration/raw-html/home.html. I repeated the check on October 13, 2026, against the live site:
- Status: 200, no redirect.
- Title: identical to the Wix title, all 123 characters.
- Canonical: identical to the one Wix served.
- Search Console verification: the same two tokens Wix served.
- Wix image CDN references: zero.
Your concentration will differ. Compute it from your own pages export. If one URL carries most of the clicks, that URL gets a field-by-field diff before the DNS changes.
Why keep a 123-character title through the move?
Because the move already changed everything else at once. Google’s guide says: “Plan your changes to your site one after the other, not everything at the same time.” This cutover changed the host, the CMS, the templates and the layout on one day.
The build had rewritten all 29 page titles, for good reasons. Nine ran past 60 characters, and the homepage ran to 123. A pre-cutover audit on September 16 compared every Wix title with the build, and every one differed.
The homepage rewrite had also dropped the words “rv rentals.” I checked what those words were worth in the query table. Queries containing “rv rental” account for 215 of the 411 clicks Search Console attributes to a query, or 52%. The top three queries were “rv rental”, “gulf shores rv rentals” and “rv rentals.”
So the commit on cutover day held every title at its Wix value and kept each rewrite beside it, unused, as proposedTitle. A test now pins each title to what Wix published. The repo’s rule for body copy says the same thing more bluntly: “Do not rewrite migrated copy.” Some of it is awkward, and those are still the strings Google indexed.
Two titles were released the next day, because they were wrong rather than long. One was /booknow, still titled “Fleet of Campers” while it competed with /fleet. On September 21, three titles that still carried a former brand name were changed too. The homepage stays held until the Search Console review.
Can a site move lose your Search Console access?
It can, and the baseline lives in that property. Google’s guide to moves without URL changes says: “Make sure your Search Console verification will continue to work after the hosting move.”
The migration content pack said the opposite. It told the build to treat the Wix verification tokens as “reference only” and to create a new property. The build followed it, and served neither of the two tokens the Wix pages carried.
Read the two together. A new property starts empty, so it holds no “before.” The old property is the only place the 92-day baseline can be compared against the same URLs after the move. If its verification tag vanishes on cutover day, ownership can fail exactly when you need the comparison.
The same pre-cutover audit caught it, and both tokens went into the root metadata before the move. Analytics got the same treatment. The old GA4 property is the only record that runs continuously across the cutover, so the site sends to both the old and the new property through the migration window.
Did every old URL land somewhere useful?
I requested all 35 URLs in the baseline pages export on October 13, 2026, with plain GET requests. Twenty-three return 200 at the same address. Twelve answer with one permanent 308 redirect to a page that returns 200. None returns a 404, and none chains.
Ten of the twelve are old camper URLs. Eight belonged to campers no longer in the fleet, and each points to the closest one still there. The other two now describe the same camper under a new URL. Every reason is recorded beside its redirect in src/data/campers.json.
The other two are old merch product pages, and they go to the homepage. Google’s guide warns against that: “Don’t redirect many old URLs to one irrelevant single URL destination, such as the home page of the new site.” It adds: “This can confuse users and might be treated as a soft 404 error.”
Here the cost is small. Those two pages had 21 impressions and no clicks in 92 days. On a site with a real store, the same shortcut would hide every lost product page behind a redirect that reports success.
The images needed their own fix. The migrated pages still loaded photos from Wix’s CDN, so closing the Wix account would have removed them. A script downloaded all 158 originals the old site served, and a test now fails the build if a Wix CDN URL reaches the built HTML. All 41 URLs in the live sitemap returned 200 with no Wix CDN reference on October 13.
Doesn’t a September drop mean the migration hurt?
No. This is the assumption I expect most people to make in Part 2, so I am putting the numbers down now. The drop started before anything moved.
| Window (all on Wix) | Clicks | Impressions | CTR | Avg. position |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jun 15 to Jul 14, 2026 | 444 | 9,435 | 4.7% | 12.0 |
| Aug 16 to Sep 14, 2026 | 202 | 5,954 | 3.4% | 11.4 |
| Change | -54.5% | -36.9% | slightly better |
Average position here is the daily position weighted by impressions, which I computed from the chart rows. Clicks fell by more than half while position held. People stopped searching for summer camper rentals. Rankings did not slip.
Google’s guide expects some movement anyway: “the visibility of your content in Search may fluctuate temporarily during the move.” It also says it “can take a few weeks or more” for new URLs to show. A post-move click count lands on top of a seasonal decline that was already running.
So the 28-day comparison will lead with position and impressions, page by page, and then clicks. I do not have the same weeks from 2025 in this export, so a year-over-year view is not in the data I have.
What will Part 2 compare?
The same export from the same URL-prefix property, 28 days after the September 16 cutover. The repo’s audit sets that review for October 14, 2026. The homepage’s position and impressions come first, then the twelve redirected URLs, then the query table.
One limit is known already. The query table attributes only 44.5% of clicks, so it cannot fully explain any change. The page-level homepage numbers will carry the verdict.
What should you do before your own Wix migration?
- Export Search Console pages, queries, devices and the daily chart before you change DNS. Save them in the repo, dated.
- Sum the daily chart yourself. Then divide each page’s clicks by the total and sort.
- Diff the top URL field by field against the old site’s HTML: status, title, canonical, verification tags, images.
- Carry every Search Console verification token across. Do not start a new property in place of the old one.
- Hold titles at their indexed values through the move. Release them one page group at a time afterwards.
- Request every URL in the pages export after cutover. Each one should return 200 or one permanent redirect to a relevant page, not the homepage.
- Write the seasonal trend down before the move, so nobody reads it as a migration loss afterwards.
If your move also changes the host, read what a www flip did to canonical signals on another site before cutover.
Sources
- Google Search Central, Site moves with URL changes (page updated 2026-08-20).
- Google Search Central, Site moves without URL changes (page updated 2025-12-10).
- Google Search Console export for www.gulfshoresrvrentals.com, June 15 to September 14, 2026, saved in the site’s repository.
- The www.gulfshoresrvrentals.com repository and live site, checked October 13, 2026.
- Related: a one-line push that reverted a live redirect and canonical fix, for checking redirect hops with
curl -sIL.
A follow-up with the 28-day post-move numbers will be linked here.
