Redesigning your website without losing your rankings

A new website should bring in more visitors, not fewer. Yet a sudden drop in search traffic after a relaunch is one of the most common stories in web design, and it is almost always avoidable. This website redesign SEO checklist covers what to do before, during and after a redesign so the rankings you have built come with you.

The short version: know exactly what the old site has, give every old URL a new home, keep the content that ranks, test the new build like a search engine would, and watch closely for the first few weeks.

Why redesigns lose rankings

Google ranks pages, not websites. When a redesign changes which pages exist, where they live and what they say, Google has to work out the new site from scratch unless you show it the way. The usual causes of a drop are:

• Missing redirects. Old URLs return 404, so the links and ranking signals they had built up are lost, and visitors from search land on an error page.
• Removed or thinned content. A long, detailed page becomes a short one with a nicer design, and it no longer answers the search it used to rank for.
• Changed titles and headings. The words that matched the search query disappear from the title or the H1.
• A blocked new site. The noindex tag or robots.txt rule used on staging goes live with the launch.
• Slower pages. Heavier images, sliders and scripts push Core Web Vitals into the red.
• Broken internal links. Navigation and in-text links still point to old addresses, so every click goes through a redirect, or nowhere.

Each of these is easy to check for. The work is in checking all of them, for every page, before launch day.

Before you start: crawl and benchmark

You cannot protect what you have not measured. Before any design work begins, capture the current site in three ways.

Crawl the old site

Run a crawler such as Screaming Frog or Sitebulb over the whole site, and export:

• every URL that returns 200, with its title, meta description, H1 and word count;
• every URL that already redirects, and where to;
• images, PDFs and other files that are linked or indexed.

Add the URLs in your XML sitemap and in your analytics, because crawlers miss pages nothing links to. The combined list is your inventory: every address that might have value.

Export your search data

From Google Search Console, export at least the last 12 months of the Pages and Queries performance reports. This tells you which URLs actually bring in clicks, and for which searches. A handful of pages often carry most of the traffic, and those are the ones you cannot afford to lose.

Record a baseline

Write down the numbers you will compare against after launch:

• organic clicks and impressions per week, from Search Console;
• organic sessions and enquiries or sales, from your analytics;
• positions for the 20 or 30 queries that matter most to the business;
• Core Web Vitals for your key templates, from PageSpeed Insights;
• the number of indexed pages, from the Search Console Pages report.

Without a baseline, “traffic feels down” is impossible to investigate.

Map every old URL to a new one

The redirect map is the most important document in the whole project. It is a simple spreadsheet: one row for every old URL, the new URL it should send visitors and search engines to, and a note on why. A few illustrative rows:

• /web-design-services.html → /services/web-design/: same topic, cleaner address.
• /about-us/ → /about/: same page, shorter address.
• /our-team/ → /about/: merged into About.
• /2019/05/spring-offer/ → /blog/: no equivalent, so the closest hub.

Rules for a good 301 redirect map:

1. One row for every URL in the inventory, including old blog posts, PDFs and pages that already redirect.
2. Send each URL to its closest equivalent, not to the homepage. Mass redirects to the homepage are usually treated as soft 404s, and the value is lost.
3. One hop only. If an old URL already redirects somewhere, point it straight at the final new address.
4. Use 301 (permanent) redirects, and keep them in place for at least a year; there is rarely a reason to remove them.
5. Cover both versions of each URL, with and without the trailing slash, and the HTTP and www variants if they ever existed.

Google’s guide to site moves with URL changes (opens in a new tab) is worth reading in full if your domain or structure is changing.

When we rebuilt marqira.com, every URL found in the crawl of the old site was given a 301 to a page on the new site map, and the build checks it automatically: a missing redirect, a chain or a redirect to a page that does not exist stops the release.

Keep what already ranks

A redesign is a good moment to improve content, but the pages that bring in search traffic need care. For each page in your top-traffic list:

• Keep the substance. If the page ranks for a question, the new version must still answer it, at least as fully. Rewriting for clarity is fine; cutting the answer is not.
• Keep the topic in the title and H1. Check the queries the page ranks for, and make sure the new title and main heading still use those words naturally.
• Keep the URL if you can. The safest redirect is the one you do not need. If an address is clean and descriptive, leave it alone.
• Keep internal links pointing at it. Pages that were linked from the main navigation or from many articles lose signals if those links disappear.
• Keep structured data. If the old page had Article, Product or FAQ markup, the new one should too.

When to merge or retire pages

Redesigns often reveal pages that compete with each other, such as three short posts on the same topic, or a service described on two different URLs. Merging them into one stronger page usually helps, as long as the merged page keeps the useful content of each and every old URL redirects to it. Pages with no traffic, no links and no business value can be retired, with a redirect to the closest relevant page.

Test the new site before launch

Test the staging site the way a search engine will see it, while there is still time to fix things. Keep staging out of the index with a password, not just a noindex tag, so there is nothing to forget at launch.

• Crawl staging. Look for broken links, missing titles and descriptions, duplicate titles, multiple H1s and pages with very little content.
• Test every redirect. Run the full list of old URLs against staging, or a test server with the redirects in place. Each one should answer 301 and land on a page that returns 200, in a single hop.
• Check canonicals and sitemap. Every page should have a canonical tag pointing to its own final address, and the XML sitemap should list only live, indexable URLs.
• Compare content. For the top-traffic pages, put the old and new versions side by side. Is the answer still there?
• Measure speed. Test the main templates in PageSpeed Insights on mobile. A redesign is the cheapest moment to fix performance.
• Validate structured data with the Rich Results Test.
• Check mobile. Google indexes the mobile version, so the same content and links must be there on a phone.

Our technical SEO guide explains each of these checks in more depth.

Launch day and the weeks after

On launch day

1. Remove the staging password and any noindex tags and robots.txt blocks.
2. Switch on the redirects, then test a sample of old URLs on the live domain.
3. Submit the new XML sitemap in Search Console.
4. Use URL Inspection to request indexing of the homepage and the most important pages.
5. Confirm analytics and conversion tracking are recording on the new site.
6. If the domain changed, use the Change of Address tool in Search Console.

The first two weeks

Check Search Console every day. The Pages report will show new 404s, redirect errors and pages excluded from the index; fix them as they appear. Watch your analytics for drops on specific pages rather than the site as a whole, and compare clicks for each old and new URL pair.

Four to twelve weeks

Some movement in positions is normal while Google recrawls and processes the redirects. Compare against your baseline at four weeks and again at twelve. If a group of pages is still down, look for a concrete cause: a missing redirect, lost content, a changed title, a slower template. Waiting rarely fixes a specific problem.

Checklist

Before you start

• Crawl the old site and export every URL, title, description and H1.
• Add URLs from the sitemap and analytics to the inventory.
• Export 12 months of Search Console page and query data.
• Record a baseline: clicks, sessions, conversions, key rankings and Core Web Vitals.

Redirects

• Map every old URL to its closest new equivalent.
• Use 301 redirects, one hop each, with and without trailing slashes.
• Never redirect pages in bulk to the homepage.

Content

• Keep the substance, title topic and H1 of every page that ranks.
• Keep clean URLs unchanged where possible.
• Merge competing pages and redirect every old URL to the merged page.
• Keep or add structured data.

Before launch

• Protect staging with a password.
• Crawl staging for broken links, missing titles and duplicate content.
• Test every redirect from the map.
• Check canonicals, the sitemap, mobile content and page speed.

Launch and after

• Remove staging blocks and noindex tags.
• Submit the new sitemap and request indexing of key pages.
• Confirm analytics and conversion tracking.
• Check Search Console daily for two weeks, then weekly.
• Compare against the baseline at four and twelve weeks.

A relaunch is where web design and SEO have to work as one project, which is how we run every rebuild. If you are planning a new site and want the redirect map, content review and launch monitoring handled properly, tell us about your project.