Moving a pharmacy website from one provider to another is a small project with a handful of ways to go wrong: losing the domain, losing the Google rankings, losing form submissions in the gap, or losing content you thought you owned. Done in the right order, none of that happens. This is the order.
Before you give notice
- Find out what you own. Who is the registrant on the domain? Do you have a login to the registrar? Do you have copies of your content and photos? Our guide to who owns your pharmacy website explains the four parts. If the domain is not in your name, get it transferred first — this is the one step that cannot be skipped.
- Read the contract. Notice period, minimum term, renewal date, exit fees, and what the provider will export. Diary the dates.
- Record what currently ranks. Open Google Search Console (or ask the provider for access). Note the pages that receive impressions and clicks — usually the homepage, one or two service pages and the repeat form. Those URLs need to be redirected, not lost.
- List every URL. A crawl of the old site (or its sitemap) gives you the list. You will map each one to a page on the new site.
Build the new site before you switch anything
The new site should be complete and reviewed on a temporary address before the domain moves. That means every service page written, every form tested, opening hours and superintendent details checked, and the disclosures in the footer. With PharmGrowth this is the normal process anyway: we build the site first, you review it, and nothing changes on your live domain until you approve.
Map the old URLs to the new ones
For every page on the old site that had traffic or links, decide where it goes on the new site, and set up a permanent (301) redirect. Google follows these and transfers most of the ranking value. Typical mapping:
- Old homepage → new homepage
- Old "services" page → new services index
- Old "travel clinic" page → new travel vaccinations page (one to one, wherever possible)
- Old "repeat prescription" page → new repeat form
- Pages with no equivalent → the closest relevant page, not the homepage for everything
If the old site used a different structure (page.php?id=12), the map still works; it just takes longer to write. Give it to the new provider before launch.
Switching day
- Point the domain's DNS at the new site. Changes propagate over a few hours.
- Check the HTTPS certificate is issued on the new host.
- Test every redirect from the map, on a phone and a desktop.
- Submit the new sitemap in Search Console and request indexing of the key pages.
- Update the website link on your Google Business Profile if the domain changed (it usually should not).
- Test every form end to end, with a real submission, and confirm it lands in the dashboard.
The fortnight after
Expect small fluctuations in rankings for two to four weeks as Google recrawls. Watch Search Console for crawl errors (404s mean a URL was missed in the map — add the redirect). Keep the old provider's hosting live, if the contract allows, for a couple of weeks as a safety net, then let it go. Check that form submissions during the switch window were not lost; if a patient submitted to the old site in the last hours, the old provider should be able to forward it.
What to keep the same
- The domain — changing it is a separate, larger project and rarely worth it
- The pharmacy name, address and phone formatting, so Google's records still match
- Page titles for pages that already rank well, unless they were poor
What to fix while you are at it
A switch is the moment to correct what the old site got wrong: a page per service, forms that finish on a phone, current disclosures, a dashboard behind the forms, and the Pharmacy structured data that helps Google read your hours and address. What a pharmacy website should include is the checklist. The switching page describes how PharmGrowth runs this process, including the redirect map.