How to redesign your website without losing your Google rankings

A new website should bring in more business, not less. But it’s common for a redesign to launch looking great and then quietly lose a large share of its search traffic over the following weeks. The cause is almost always the same: things Google relied on were changed or removed without anyone noticing.

I’ve led several site rebuilds and CMS migrations. This is the checklist I use to make sure rankings survive.

Before you change anything

1. Record what’s working now

Export your current pages and their performance from Google Search Console: which pages get clicks, and for which searches. Crawl the old site and save the list of every URL, title and description. This is your baseline, and you can’t recreate it after the old site is gone.

2. Find your most valuable pages

Usually a small number of pages bring in most of the search traffic. Make a list. These need the most care: keep their content, their URL if possible, and their internal links.

3. Keep URLs where you can

Every URL that changes is a small risk. If the new site can use the same URLs as the old one, most of the danger disappears. If you’re changing platform or structure, plan the new URLs deliberately rather than accepting whatever the new system generates.

During the build

4. Map every old URL to a new one

For each old URL, decide where it should go on the new site. Then set up a permanent (301) redirect from old to new. Redirect to the most relevant equivalent page, not the home page. Pages that genuinely have no equivalent can be left to return a 404.

5. Don’t throw away content that ranks

Redesigns are a good time to tidy up, but cutting or rewriting your best-performing pages is risky. Improve them, don’t replace them. If you merge pages, redirect the old ones to the merged page.

6. Carry over the on-page basics

Check each important page has:

• A unique, descriptive title and meta description
• One clear H1 heading
• Structured data where relevant (organisation, articles, products, FAQs)
• Descriptive alt text on images
• Internal links to and from related pages

7. Keep the staging site out of Google

Block your staging site from search engines so it doesn’t compete with your live site. Then make absolutely sure that block isn’t copied to production at launch. It happens more often than you’d think.

8. Make it fast

A redesign is the perfect moment to fix performance. Google uses Core Web Vitals as a ranking signal, and faster sites convert better. Test real pages on a mid-range phone, not just your laptop.

At launch

9. Test the redirects

Run your list of old URLs against the live site and confirm every one lands on the right page with a single redirect. Fix chains and loops.

10. Submit your new sitemap

Submit the new XML sitemap in Google Search Console and check the robots.txt file allows crawling.

11. Check the canonical URLs

Make sure each page tells Google its one preferred address, and that it’s the version you actually use (with or without www, with or without a trailing slash).

After launch

12. Watch Search Console closely for a month

Keep an eye on indexing reports, crawl errors and 404s, and compare clicks for your most valuable pages against your baseline. Small dips in the first week or two are normal while Google recrawls. A sustained drop on specific pages usually points to a missing redirect or lost content.

13. Update links you control

Update links on your social profiles, email signatures, directory listings and anywhere else you control, so they point to the new URLs directly.

The short version

Keep your URLs or redirect them properly, keep the content that ranks, carry over the on-page basics, and watch Search Console after launch. Most redesign traffic losses are avoidable with a spreadsheet and a bit of discipline.

Planning a redesign? Tell us about it. Protecting your search traffic is part of how we build, not an extra.