The fear that keeps creators on platforms they hate: "my old posts rank — if I move, I lose that." Here's the honest answer. You lose it only if you skip one boring step.
Google's trust lives on your URLs
Every address that earns traffic must forward — a 301 redirect — to its new home. That's how Google and every old backlink follow you. Ghost handles this with a single redirects file: one pattern rule can forward every post at once.
Done right vs. skipped
Done right: rankings wobble for two to four weeks, then recover. Skipped: years of accumulated trust evaporate in a day. That's the entire SEO risk of a migration — it isn't mysterious, it's just skipped because it's boring.
The safe order: export everything → list your top 20 URLs → import to a staging site → write the redirects before the domain moves → keep the old site up 30 days as insurance.