Pages disappear, addresses change, nobody redirects them, and rankings that took years to earn vanish in a week. It’s entirely avoidable, and it’s avoided by doing a few unglamorous things in the right order. This is how we handle every redesign we do, written down so you can check it against whoever is doing yours.
Why redesigns lose traffic
Google ranks pages, not websites. Each page on your current site has its own history: how long it’s been live, which sites link to it, what it ranks for. When a redesign changes a page’s address without telling Google where it went, that history is lost. When a page is dropped altogether, its rankings go with it. When the new site is slower, has thinner content or buries the important pages three clicks deep, every page suffers a little.
The damage usually shows two to four weeks after launch, which is long enough that people don’t connect it with the redesign.
Before anything changes: the audit
Record what you’ve got before you touch it. You can’t protect what you haven’t measured.
- Every URL on the current site. A crawl with a tool like Screaming Frog, or at minimum the sitemap.
- Which pages get traffic from Google, from Search Console (the Pages report) and Analytics. Sort by clicks. The top twenty are the ones you absolutely cannot lose.
- Which pages bring in enquiries or sales, from Analytics conversions. Sometimes these aren’t the top traffic pages.
- Which pages have links from other sites, from Search Console’s Links report or a backlink tool. These carry authority that must be preserved.
- Current rankings for your important searches, so you can compare afterwards.
- Page titles, meta descriptions and headings for every page, because they’re easy to lose in a rebuild and they matter.
- Site speed scores, so you know whether the new site is faster or slower.
The redirect map
This is the single most important document in a redesign. It’s a spreadsheet with two columns: every old URL, and the new URL it should send people (and Google) to. Rules:
- Every old URL that had traffic, links or rankings gets a redirect. No exceptions.
- Redirect to the most relevant new page, not the homepage. A page about boiler repairs should redirect to the new boiler repairs page. Redirecting everything to the homepage tells Google the pages are gone.
- Use permanent (301) redirects, not temporary ones.
- If a page is genuinely being dropped with no equivalent, redirect it to the nearest parent page.
- Keep the old URLs where you can. If the page is just being redesigned, there’s no reason to change its address at all.
The redirect map goes live at the same moment as the new site. Not the day after.
Content you must keep
A redesign is a tempting moment to cut pages. Some should go. But before dropping any page, check the audit: if it has traffic, links or rankings, keep it, even if it’s a blog post from 2019 nobody on the team remembers. You can tidy it, update it or merge it into a better page (with a redirect), but don’t just delete it.
The same goes for the text on pages you’re keeping. A new design with half the words is a thinner page in Google’s eyes. If a page ranked because it answered a question thoroughly, the new version has to answer it just as thoroughly.
At launch: the technical checks
- Redirects live and tested, every row of the map.
- Page titles and meta descriptions carried over or improved, not reset to defaults.
- Headings in a logical order, one H1 per page.
- XML sitemap updated and submitted in Search Console.
- Robots.txt checked: it’s common for a staging site’s “block all search engines” setting to go live with the new site, which stops Google indexing anything.
- Canonical tags pointing at the right URLs.
- Structured data in place (organisation, local business, products, FAQs as relevant).
- Internal links pointing at new URLs, not through redirects.
- Analytics and Search Console tracking working on the new site.
- Speed tested against the old site’s scores.
The first month after launch
Watch Search Console daily for the first week, then weekly. The Coverage or Pages report will show you errors and pages Google can’t find. The Performance report will show whether clicks are holding. A small dip in the first week or two is normal while Google re-crawls. A continued fall after a month means something was missed, usually a redirect or a dropped page, and the audit will tell you which.
A checklist
- [ ] Crawl and record every current URL
- [ ] List pages with traffic, conversions and links
- [ ] Record titles, descriptions, headings, rankings and speed
- [ ] Build the redirect map, every old URL to its best new match
- [ ] Keep every page that earns its place; merge rather than delete
- [ ] Carry content over at full depth
- [ ] Launch redirects with the site, not after
- [ ] Check robots, sitemap, canonicals, titles, structured data, tracking
- [ ] Monitor Search Console for a month
How we do it
Every redesign we take on starts with this audit, and the redirect map is signed off before the new site is built. We keep what’s working, protect the rankings you’ve earned and rebuild the rest. Happy Hay’s rebuild (brand, shop and marketing) took them to £40,000+ a month; it started with a list of what the old site was already doing right. If you’d like us to look at yours, ring 0800 699 0037 or email hello@codesky.co.uk.
