Most ranking losses after a redesign come from changed page addresses, deleted content and technical mistakes, not from the new design itself. To protect your rankings, record what ranks and brings traffic today, keep or improve the content on those pages, redirect every old address to its closest new page with a permanent (301) redirect, and watch Google Search Console closely for the first few weeks after launch.
Before you start: take stock
You can only protect what you have measured:
- Export your pages and their traffic from Google Search Console and your analytics
- List the pages that rank, bring enquiries or have links from other websites
- Note the search terms each important page appears for
Map every old address
Make a list of every old page address and the new address it should go to. Pages being merged point to the page that replaces them. Pages with no equivalent point to the closest relevant page, not simply to the home page.
Keep what works
A redesign is a chance to improve content, not to throw it away:
- Keep the content that earns rankings, and improve it rather than cutting it
- Keep titles and headings focused on the same topics
- Keep or improve internal links to important pages
- Carry structured data across to the new pages
Launch day checklist
Most redesign problems are caught or caused on the day:
- Turn on the 301 redirects and test a sample of old addresses
- Check the new site isn’t blocked from search by leftover “noindex” tags or robots.txt rules from the staging site
- Submit the new sitemap in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools
- Check that analytics and enquiry tracking still work
After launch
Watch Search Console for crawl errors and for pages dropping out of the index over the following weeks, and fix broken redirects quickly. Some movement in rankings is normal while search engines re-crawl the site; it usually settles within a few weeks if the redirects and content are right.