Wix SEO After the Platform Rewrites Your URLs

When a Wix redesign changes your page URLs, Google sees it the way it sees any URL change: the old addresses and the new ones are different URLs, and the rankings the old ones earned depend on redirects carrying visitors and crawlers across. Wix handles part of this for you and leaves part to you. Knowing which part is which tells you where to look after a drop: find the old URLs that now return 404 or land on the wrong page, redirect each one to its real replacement, and restore the page settings the redesign changed.

What Wix redirects on its own

Wix’s help article on setting up a 301 redirect describes three rules:

• Slug changes redirect automatically. When you update a page’s URL slug, Wix creates a 301 redirect from the old URL for you, and you can edit or delete these automatic redirects in the URL Redirect Manager after publishing.
• Blog posts are the exception. For Wix Blog pages, 301 redirects are not created automatically. When you change a blog post’s slug, you have to create the redirect yourself in the URL Redirect Manager.
• Redirects need a custom domain. The article says 301 redirects only work with custom domains, and you can’t set up a 301 redirect from free Wix URLs to a Premium site.

So a redesign that renamed standard pages one at a time may be covered, while blog posts whose slugs changed, and any old URL that no page claims anymore, are not.

Find the URLs that broke

Use Search Console rather than memory. The Page indexing report groups URLs by status, and two statuses matter after a redesign:

• Not found (404): old URLs that now return nothing. These are the ones no redirect covers.
• Page with redirect: URLs that redirect elsewhere. Inspect a sample to check where they land. A redirect to the home page or a loosely related page isn’t a replacement.

The report’s example lists are samples, so compare them with any record you have of the old site: a saved sitemap, an analytics export of top pages, or an earlier crawl. Triage by traffic and links, highest first.

Build the redirects Wix didn’t

In the URL Redirect Manager, create a 301 redirect from each broken old URL to the page that answers the same need. Google’s documentation on redirects explains why the type matters: a permanent redirect is a signal that the target should be canonical, while the indexing pipeline doesn’t use a temporary redirect that way. For a page that has moved for good, use 301, not 302.

Point each redirect at the true counterpart, not the home page. Google’s site move guide warns that redirecting many old URLs to one irrelevant destination such as the home page can confuse users and might be treated as a soft 404.

For a long list, Wix’s guide to importing and exporting URL redirects lets you upload redirects in a CSV file, with a maximum of 500 redirects per file; redirects beyond that limit in the same file aren’t imported. Split larger maps into several files, and check the imported redirects once the upload finishes.

Restore what the redesign reset

A redirect restores the address. It doesn’t restore what the page said. After a template change, check each important page for:

• Titles and meta descriptions that fell back to generic defaults
• Body content that the new template shortened or dropped
• Image alt text and images that no longer load at their old addresses

A page with a new URL, a generic title and a thinner body can be harder for Google to recognize as the page that used to rank. Put the specific title, description and content back alongside the redirect.

Verify, then prevent the next one

Run a sample of remapped old URLs through the URL Inspection tool to confirm Google gets the redirect and the destination, and request indexing for your key pages. Then watch the Page indexing report: the “Not found (404)” examples for old URLs should shrink as Google recrawls them, at crawl speed rather than overnight.

Before the next redesign, save a list of every current URL, from your sitemap and a crawl, and export your existing redirects from the URL Redirect Manager. After the change, compare the old list with the new site and build every missing redirect in one pass.

Frequently asked questions

Does Wix redirect automatically when I change a page URL?

For standard pages, yes: Wix creates a 301 redirect when you update the slug, as long as the site uses a custom domain. Blog posts are the exception, and their redirects have to be created by hand.

Why did traffic drop if Wix made redirects?

The automatic redirects cover slug edits on standard pages. Blog slug changes, pages the redesign removed or merged, and old URLs that no page claims can still return 404 or land on the wrong page. Titles and content that changed with the template can also make the new page a weaker match.

Can I bulk-upload redirects on Wix?

Yes, with a CSV file in the URL Redirect Manager, up to 500 redirects per file.