How to redesign a website without losing SEO

To redesign a website without losing SEO, do four things: record which pages and search terms the current site ranks for, redirect every old URL to its closest new equivalent with a single permanent redirect, keep the content on pages that earn traffic rather than cutting it back, and submit the new sitemap and watch Search Console closely for the month after launch. Almost every redesign that loses rankings skips one of those, and the redirects are the one skipped most often.

The reason it goes wrong is that a redesign is usually briefed and judged on how the new site looks. Rankings are earned by URLs and the content on them, neither of which shows up in a design mock-up. So the new site launches, it looks far better, and a fortnight later the enquiries have fallen because every page Google had indexed now returns a not-found error.

Step one is a record of what you have. Export the pages report from Google Analytics and the performance report from Search Console for the last twelve months. You want three lists: pages that get organic visits, the search terms that bring them, and pages that produce enquiries. Add a full crawl or the current sitemap so that pages with no visits but with links from other sites are not forgotten. This is the baseline everything afterwards is measured against.

Step two is the redirect map. Put every old URL in one column and its new home in the next. Where a page is being kept, it maps to its new address. Where pages are merged, they all map to the merged page. Where a page is genuinely being dropped, it maps to the nearest relevant page, not the homepage, because redirecting everything to the homepage is treated much like a not-found page. Use permanent redirects, one hop each, with no chains through an intermediate address. If the URLs are not changing at all, which is the safest option where the structure allows, the map is short and the risk drops sharply.

Step three is the content. A page that ranks usually ranks because of what is on it, and a redesign that trims a 900-word service page to 150 words and three icons tends to trim the rankings with it. Keep the substance of pages that earn, improve how they read, and carry across the titles and headings unless there is a good reason to change them. Content that earns nothing can be merged or dropped, deliberately and with a redirect.

Step four is the technical checks on a staging copy before launch. Make sure the staging site is blocked from search engines and that the block is removed at launch, a mistake common enough to be worth writing on the checklist. Test every redirect against the old URL list. Check that each page has one clear heading, a sensible title, and that structured data and canonical tags point at the live domain rather than the staging one.

Step five is launch day. Remove any staging block, submit the new XML sitemap in Search Console, and request indexing for the handful of most important pages. If the domain itself is changing, use the change of address tool as well. Keep the old sitemap available for a short while so that Google can find and follow the redirects quickly.

Step six is monitoring, and it is the step that turns a risky launch into a safe one. Check the Search Console not-found and coverage reports daily for the first week, then weekly for a month. Compare rankings and organic visits for the pages on your baseline list. Watch enquiries, because a form that stopped sending is a bigger problem than a ranking that dipped. Some movement for a couple of weeks is normal while Google recrawls the site. A sharp, sustained drop on particular pages usually traces back to a missing redirect or stripped content, and both are quick to fix once found.

None of this is unusual or proprietary. Google’s own documentation on site moves recommends the same things: one permanent redirect per old URL, an updated sitemap, and patience while the move is processed. The difference between a redesign that keeps its rankings and one that loses them is mostly whether somebody was given the job of doing it.

When you brief a web designer, ask who builds the redirect map, when it is tested, and what monitoring happens after launch. A clear answer to all three is a good sign. Our own redesigns start with that audit and finish with two weeks of monitoring, and the redirect map is part of the fixed price rather than an optional extra.

• Website Redesign, Replacing a tired site without throwing away the rankings and enquiries the old one was quietly earning.
• Website Care Plans, Updates, backups, security patching and small changes, on a monthly plan with a named team behind it.