The new site looks great. Two weeks after launch the calls have gone quiet and nobody can say why. In our experience it is one of the most common bad endings to a redesign, and it is almost entirely preventable. In practice, website redesign SEO is a short list of things you record before launch, carry across during the build and check afterward.
Use it as a checklist alongside our small business guide to a website redesign. Most of it needs nothing more than Search Console and a spreadsheet.
Why traffic drops after a redesign
Most of the drops we see come from four causes, and all of them are mechanical.
- The URLs changed and nothing points the old ones at the new ones, so every link and ranking attached to an old address now leads nowhere.
- A page that answered a question and brought in visitors was deleted because it did not fit the new design.
- A designer rewrote the titles, headings and metadata, and pages that used to say what they were about now say something vaguer.
- The staging site's blocking rules went live with it. A noindex tag left in place drops your pages out of search results, a disallow rule stops Google from crawling them, and nothing on the page looks any different.
Expect some movement either way. Google says "some changes might take effect in a few hours, others could take several months" (Google Search Central), so a wobble in week one is not automatically a disaster. You can only tell whether it is one if you recorded what normal looked like.
Before you touch anything: benchmark what you have
Do this while the old site is still live. It usually takes an afternoon, and with the numbers saved you can diagnose a drop instead of arguing about one.
- Export your Search Console data. The Performance report gives clicks, impressions, CTR and average position, and its default view only covers the past three months (Google Search Console Help), so export a longer range and save the file outside the site.
- List your top pages: the twenty URLs that bring the most clicks and the twenty that bring the most conversions. The two lists often differ, and you need both.
- Crawl the whole site and put every URL in one spreadsheet with its title, meta description, H1 and status code. This becomes the redirect map.
- Record which sites link to you, and to which pages. Those are the pages where a broken redirect costs the most.
- Save a baseline of monthly organic sessions, form submissions and calls for the last twelve months, so you measure "down" against a normal year rather than last week.
URLs and redirects: map every old page to a new one
Take the crawl spreadsheet and add a column for the new URL each old one becomes, then fill in every row. A merged page points at the page that absorbed it, and a retired one points at its closest survivor.
Then serve permanent redirects. Google recommends "a permanent server-side redirect whenever possible", because the indexing pipeline uses a permanent redirect as a signal that the new URL should be canonical, while a temporary one does not (Google Search Central). Two rules from Google's site move documentation are worth pinning above the desk: "Don't redirect many old URLs to one irrelevant single URL destination, such as the home page", and "Keep the redirects for as long as possible, generally at least 1 year" (Google Search Central). The same page notes that permanent redirects "don't cause a loss in PageRank", so a correct map keeps the link value the old URLs earned.
If you are also changing domain or subdomain, use Google's Change of Address tool; you do not need it for path changes on the same domain. Update your own internal links as well instead of leaning on the redirects. Google's guidance is to "replace all URLs that pointed to your own pages" using the mapping you built (Google Search Central).
Content you must not delete by accident
A redesign is a good time to retire dead pages and a bad time to delete pages just because they are awkward to lay out. Check anything you plan to cut against your top-pages export and your link export.
Three kinds of page often get cut by accident: old blog posts that still answer a question people search for, service pages for work you still do but do not lead with, and location or service-area pages, which a new template often has no slot for. If local search matters to you, read local SEO for small business before you approve a sitemap that drops them.
When a page has to go, redirect it to the nearest survivor and move its useful content into that page, so the answer stays on the site under the new URL.
Technical SEO carry-over
These items are small and dull, and they decide whether a page keeps its meaning after the move.
- Carry titles and meta descriptions across on purpose. Google says a title should be "unique to the page, clear and concise, and accurately describes the contents of the page" (Google Search Central).
- Keep one H1 per page, and write subheadings that say what each section covers.
- Rebuild image alt text as you go, because migrations often drop it.
- If the old site marked up your business, services, reviews or FAQs with structured data, the new templates need the same markup.
- Check canonical tags, robots rules and the XML sitemap on the live site, not on staging.
- Where you are changing URLs anyway, make them descriptive. Google suggests including "words in the URL that may be useful for users" (Google Search Central).
Speed, mobile and Core Web Vitals on the new build
Google indexes and ranks using the mobile version of a page, crawled with the smartphone agent, and advises that if the mobile site has less content than the desktop site you should make the primary content equivalent (Google Search Central). If the new layout hides content on phones to look tidy, you have in effect removed that content.
Set the Core Web Vitals as acceptance criteria before the build: Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less, Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less, at the 75th percentile of page loads (web.dev). Keep them in proportion, though. Google says there is "no single signal" for page experience and that Search "always seeks to show the most relevant content, even if the page experience is sub-par" (Google Search Central). Treat speed as a tie-breaker between pages that answer the search equally well.
Launch day and the first 30 days
On launch day, confirm the staging noindex and disallow rules are gone, hand-test the redirects for your top twenty pages, submit the new sitemap in Search Console, and check forms and call tracking from a real phone.
In week one, watch for 404s and for pages that are not getting indexed. In weeks two to four, compare clicks and impressions against your saved export page by page rather than site-wide, because a site-wide average can hide the one page that lost everything. Then fix what you find, whether that is a missing redirect, a flattened title or a page that never made it across. If a drop persists past a month and the mechanics check out, that is the time to bring in search engine optimization help instead of waiting.
Website redesign SEO FAQ
Will I lose rankings if my URLs stay the same?
Much less is at risk, which is a good reason to keep them. You can still lose ground by deleting content, rewriting titles carelessly or shipping a slower site, so the benchmark and carry-over steps still apply.
How long should I keep the redirects?
Google's guidance is to keep them "for as long as possible, generally at least 1 year" (Google Search Central). In practice, leave them in place for good. They cost almost nothing to keep, and removing them breaks links you do not control.
Should I launch everything at once or in stages?
For a small site, launch everything at once with the redirect map ready. Staged launches multiply the URL states you have to track. Either way, pick a quiet week rather than your busiest month.
Does this add much to the cost of a redesign?
Planned into the build, it is one line item on the quote. Left until traffic drops after launch, it turns into emergency work. Look for it when you compare proposals, and see what a website redesign costs for the other line items. Both the redirect map and 30 days of post-launch monitoring are standard on our own rebuilds.
What to do next
If your relaunch is weeks away, do the benchmark now: export Search Console, crawl the site and list your top pages. The rest of website redesign SEO gets easier once those three files exist, and you cannot recreate them after the old site is gone. The wider project is covered in the website redesign guide, and the way we run a build and launch is on our website development service page.
If you are planning a relaunch and want the SEO side handled with it, send us your site and we will tell you what is at risk.
