How to redesign your website without losing your Google rankings

A new design is exciting, but search engines do not care how the site looks. They care whether the pages that earned rankings are still there, still say the same useful things, and still load fast. Most traffic drops after a redesign come from a handful of avoidable mistakes.

Before you change anything

1. 1Crawl the current site and export every URL, title, heading and status code.
2. 2Find the pages that matter. In Google Search Console and your analytics, list the pages that bring traffic, leads and backlinks.
3. 3Decide what stays, merges or goes. Not every old page deserves a place on the new site, but every removal needs a plan.
4. 4Save a backup of the old site and its content.

Keep what already works

If a page ranks well, think twice before changing its URL, title, main heading or core content. A better design can sit around the same words and the same address. Improve the page, do not reinvent it.

Plan your redirects

Whenever an address changes, the old one must send visitors and search engines to the new one with a permanent (301) redirect.

• Redirect each old URL to the most relevant new page, one to one.
• Avoid chains (A to B to C), and avoid sending everything to the home page.
• Update internal links so they point to the final URLs.
• Keep the redirects in place for at least a year.

// next.config.js
module.exports = {
  async redirects() {
    return [
      { source: "/old-services", destination: "/services", permanent: true },
      { source: "/blog/2019/:slug", destination: "/blog/:slug", permanent: true },
    ];
  },
};

With hundreds of URLs, build the list in a spreadsheet and generate the rules automatically with our redirect map generator.

Launch-day checks

• Redirects work, and key old URLs return a 301 to the right page.
• The live site is indexable, with no accidental noindex and no blocking in robots.txt.
• Titles, descriptions, headings and structured data carried over.
• The sitemap is updated and submitted in Search Console.
• Analytics and conversion tracking are firing.
• The new pages pass a speed and mobile test.

After launch

Watch Search Console for crawl errors and 404s every day for the first week, then weekly for a couple of months. Fix broken links quickly, compare traffic for your key pages with the period before launch, and expect some short-term movement while search engines re-crawl the site.

Planning a redesign? Talk to us and we will include an SEO migration plan from day one.