A new website can transform how customers see your business. But redesigns are also one of the most common reasons sites suddenly lose search visibility. The cause is almost always the same: URLs, content and technical signals change without a plan.
Start with an inventory
Before anything is designed, export a full list of your current URLs, along with which pages receive search traffic, links and conversions. These are the pages you must protect.
Map every old URL to a new one
For every URL that changes, decide where it should go on the new site and set up a 301 redirect. Avoid redirecting everything to the homepage — send each page to its closest equivalent.
Keep what works
If a page ranks well, be careful about removing the content that earns those rankings. Improve it, restructure it, modernize it — but don’t throw it away.
Preserve technical signals
- Carry over title tags and meta descriptions (then improve them).
- Keep structured data in place.
- Make sure the staging site is blocked from indexing, and that the live site is not.
- Generate a fresh XML sitemap and submit it in Google Search Console.
Monitor after launch
Watch crawl errors, indexing and traffic closely in the weeks after launch. Most problems are easy to fix if you catch them quickly.
Planning a redesign? Talk to us before you launch — it is much easier to protect rankings than to recover them.