A new website should bring more customers, not fewer. Yet redesigns are one of the most common causes of sudden drops in search traffic. Almost always, the cause is avoidable. Here is the checklist we follow.
Before the redesign
- Crawl the current site and export every URL, title, description and heading.
- Find your valuable pages in Google Search Console and analytics: the ones that get traffic, rank for important terms or have links from other sites.
- Decide each page’s future: keep, merge, improve or retire.
- Record a baseline of rankings, traffic and conversions so you can compare after launch.
During the build
- Keep URLs where you can. If a URL works, there is no need to change it.
- Build a redirect map from every old URL to its closest new equivalent. Read more about 301 redirects.
- Carry over on-page SEO: titles, descriptions, headings and the content that earned your rankings.
- Keep the staging site private so Google does not index it.
- Test speed, mobile and accessibility on staging before launch.
Launch day
- Turn on redirects and test a sample of old URLs.
- Make sure the live site is not set to discourage search engines. This setting is easy to forget.
- Submit the new XML sitemap in Google Search Console.
- Check analytics and conversion tracking are firing.
After launch
- Watch Search Console for 404 errors and fix them with redirects.
- Compare rankings and traffic to your baseline over the following weeks. Small fluctuations are normal; sustained drops need investigation.
Planning a redesign? Our website redesign service follows this checklist on every project.
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