A new website should bring in more business, not less. Yet it's surprisingly common for a redesign to launch, look great, and then quietly lose a large share of its search traffic over the following weeks. It almost always comes down to a few avoidable mistakes. Here is the process we follow to protect rankings.
1. Record what you have before you change anything
Before anyone opens a design tool, export a list of every URL on the current site. Use your XML sitemap, a crawler such as Screaming Frog, and the Pages report in Google Search Console. Then mark the pages that actually matter: the ones that get organic traffic, earn links from other sites or bring in enquiries.
For each important page, save the current title tag, meta description and main heading. This becomes your baseline.
2. Keep your URLs the same wherever possible
Every URL that ranks has history behind it. If the new site can use the same addresses, keep them. Renaming /services to /what-we-do because it sounds nicer gives that history away for no real gain.
When a URL genuinely has to change, or two pages are being merged, set up a permanent 301 redirect from the old address to the closest new equivalent. Don't redirect everything to the homepage — Google treats that much like a missing page.
3. Move the content, not just the design
Redesigns often trim copy to make pages look cleaner. But if a page ranked because it answered a question thoroughly, cutting half the text can remove the very reason it ranked. Keep the substance, improve the layout around it, and make sure each heading still describes what its section is about.
4. Check the technical details on staging
Before launch, go through the staging site and confirm:
- Every page has its own unique title and meta description.
- Canonical tags point to the page itself, not to the homepage. We have seen live sites get this wrong on every inner page, which tells Google not to index them.
- The staging site is hidden from search engines — and that block is removed on launch day.
- Internal links point straight to the new URLs rather than through redirects.
- Images have descriptive alt text, and pages load quickly on a phone.
5. Launch, then watch closely
On launch day, submit the new XML sitemap in Google Search Console and test a sample of old URLs to confirm each one redirects to the right place. Over the next few weeks, keep an eye on the Pages and Performance reports for a jump in 404 errors or a drop on pages that used to perform well.
Some movement in rankings for a week or two is normal while Google recrawls the site. A steady decline is not, and it usually points to a missing redirect or content that didn't make it across.
A real example
When we redesigned the website for WhyShared, a web hosting company, the brief changed almost everything visual: colours, typography, layout and imagery. What stayed exactly the same were the URLs, page titles, canonical tags and every order link, all checked against the live site before launch. The design was new; everything Google relied on was left in place.
Planning a redesign?
If your current site ranks for anything valuable, protect it before you rebuild. Our website design and development team plans migrations with SEO built in from the first meeting. Get in touch and we'll start with an audit of what you already have. If local customers are your priority, our local SEO checklist is a good next read.
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