Website Redesign SEO: 8 Steps to Keep Your Google Traffic

A company relaunches its website. The design is far better, pages load quickly and everyone is pleased. Two or three weeks later, someone notices that fewer enquiries are coming through the contact form. A look at Search Console shows that several pages that used to sit on the first page of results have dropped out of sight entirely.

Most of the time this doesn't mean the new site is worse. Google knew where everything lived on the old site, and nobody remembered to carry that knowledge across to the new one. In this piece we walk through, in order, what it takes to protect your traffic during a redesign.

1. Take a snapshot of the old site

Before any redesign work begins, make an inventory of the old site:

• Every page URL, from a crawler or from the sitemap.
• The pages that earned clicks in Search Console over the past twelve months, with the click count for each.
• The pages with the most links from other websites.

This list is the most valuable document in the whole project. Once the new site is live you may never be able to reach the old one again, but the list stays with you.

2. Pick out the pages that matter

Pages are not equally important. Splitting the list into three groups makes the job manageable:

• Traffic earners: Service, product and blog pages that get steady visits from search.
• Link earners: Pages that other sites, news stories and directories point to.
• The rest: Old campaigns, empty categories and announcements that no longer apply.

Every page in the first two groups needs a counterpart on the new site. The third group needs a decision as well: will each page be redirected, or retired on purpose?

3. Build an old-URL-to-new-URL map

Most redesigns change the URL structure too. A page that lived at /our-services/web-design.html becomes /services/web-design. In the browser everything looks fine, but Google and every old link out there still arrive at the old address.

Draw up a table that gives the new URL for every old one. The rule is simple: each old page should point to the new page closest to it in meaning. Sending everything to the homepage looks convenient, but to a search engine it usually amounts to the page vanishing.

4. Set up permanent redirects properly

Each row in the table should become a permanent (301 or 308) redirect on the server. Points to watch:

• No chains. The old URL should lead straight to its final destination. A redirect from A to B and then from B to C is slower and leaks value along the way.
• No loops. A redirect must never point back to itself or to the step before it.
• Remember language and domain variants. With and without www, http and https, with and without a trailing slash: all of them should end up at one correct URL.
• Avoid temporary redirects. A temporary (302) redirect tells the search engine that the old address will be back soon.

5. Don't quietly cut the content

New designs tend to come with shorter copy. A long service page turns into a stylish card with three sentences on it. Even if the URL stays exactly the same, the content that earned the page its top position may be gone.

On the pages that bring in traffic, keep the heading, the main text and the FAQs, or replace them with something better. A new design should present the content better, not shrink it.

6. Review the technical tags

Before launch, check these on the staging site:

• Does every page have its own title and description, or do they all share the same ones?
• Does every page carry a canonical tag pointing at its own URL?
• On a multilingual site, do the language versions reference one another correctly?
• Did the "noindex" setting used on staging make it onto the live site? This is one of the most frequent, and most costly, mistakes in any redesign.

7. A launch-day checklist

The launch-day list is short, but every item counts:

• Submit the new sitemap in Search Console.
• Try a sample of URLs from the table by hand: does each one land on the right page in a single hop?
• Test the contact form and the phone and WhatsApp links on a real device.
• Confirm that analytics and conversion tracking work on the new site; without them you can't even measure a drop.

8. Keep watching for the first three months

In the weeks after launch, check the "not found" (404) reports in Search Console regularly. Google keeps requesting old URLs for months, and an address that was missed in the table only shows up in this report. Add each missing URL you find to the table and redirect it.

A little movement in traffic during the first weeks is normal. If particular pages show a drop that doesn't recover, compare the old and new versions of those pages: did the URL change, did the content get shorter, or is a redirect missing?

In short

A redesign changes the design; it should not throw away your URLs, your content or what the search engine already knows about you. Take an inventory of the old site, identify the pages that matter, redirect every old URL permanently to the right new one, keep the content, and keep an eye on the "not found" report after launch.

This is the checklist we follow when we redesign corporate websites: the new design and infrastructure, the redirect table for old URLs, technical SEO checks and post-launch monitoring all belong to the same project.