How to Redesign Your Website Without Losing Rankings

To Google, a web address is a page. Change the address and, as far as Google is concerned, you’ve created a new page with no history, while the old one, with its rankings, its links from other websites and its place in people’s bookmarks, now leads nowhere. That’s the main reason rankings drop after a redesign, and it has nothing to do with how the new site looks.

This isn’t an argument against a new website. Old platforms become a pain to update and designs date. But a relaunch is one of the few jobs that can undo years of search visibility in an afternoon, and nearly all of the risk can be dealt with before the new site goes live. Google’s own guidance on site moves with URL changes is the reference point for everything below.

What usually goes wrong

When rankings fall after a relaunch, the cause is almost always technical rather than visual:

• Old URLs weren’t redirected. A page that lived at /services/boiler-repairs/ now lives at /boiler-repair-gloucester/, and the old address shows a “page not found” error.
• Pages were dropped or cut down. A detailed service page that ranked well is replaced by three short paragraphs, or merged into a general page.
• Page titles and descriptions were overwritten by the new theme’s defaults.
• The site is still hidden from Google. Development sites are usually set to “noindex” or blocked in robots.txt so they don’t appear in search, and that setting sometimes survives the launch.
• Internal links changed. Pages that used to be linked from the menu and from other pages quietly lose those links.

None of these shows up as an obvious error. Every page loads and the site looks great. The damage only appears weeks later in the traffic figures.

Keep your URLs if you can

The best redirect is the one you never need. If the new site can use the same addresses as the old one, keep them, even if a tidier structure is tempting. Most content management systems let you set each page’s address by hand, so moving platform doesn’t have to mean changing URLs.

Change URLs only when there’s a real benefit, and go in knowing there’s some risk. Google says to expect temporary fluctuations in rankings during a move like this, and that a medium-sized site can take a few weeks or more to settle, even when everything is done properly.

Build a redirect map before the new site is built

A redirect map is a spreadsheet with two columns: every old URL, and the new URL it should point to. For most small business sites it runs to a few dozen rows, and it’s the most useful document in the whole project. Agree it before the developer starts, not the week before launch.

Collect every old URL

Don’t rely on the menu. Pull addresses from several places, because each one catches pages the others miss:

• your current XML sitemap and your content management system’s list of pages
• a crawl of the live site (Screaming Frog’s free version handles up to 500 URLs, which covers most small sites)
• the Pages tab of Google Search Console’s Performance report, set to the longest date range (up to 16 months)
• the Landing page report in Google Analytics
• Search Console’s Links report, which shows the pages other websites link to most
• every final URL in your Google Ads account, including sitelinks
• your Google Business Profile website link, and any addresses printed on vans, leaflets or email signatures

Match each old page to its closest new equivalent

Each old URL should point to the new page that does the same job. Say you’re a heating engineer in Gloucester. Part of your map might look like this:

• /services/boiler-repairs/ to /boiler-repair-gloucester/ (same service, new address)
• /services/boiler-servicing/ and /services/annual-boiler-service/ both to /boiler-servicing/ (two old pages merged into one)
• /gas-safety-certificates/ stays as it is (no redirect needed)
• /news/summer-offer-2019/ returns a 404 (expired offer, nothing equivalent on the new site)

What you shouldn’t do is send everything without an obvious home to the homepage. Google specifically warns against redirecting lots of old URLs to one irrelevant page such as the homepage: it confuses visitors and may be treated as a “soft 404”, meaning Google treats it as a missing page anyway. If a page is being dropped with no equivalent, letting it return a 404 or 410 “not found” response is the correct thing to do.

Use permanent, one-step redirects

• Use 301 (permanent) redirects set up on the server or in your CMS’s redirect settings. Temporary redirects, or pages that forward visitors using JavaScript, send the wrong signal for a permanent move.
• Go straight to the final page. If the site already has redirects from an earlier redesign, update them so an old URL doesn’t hop through two or three addresses before arriving.
• Keep them for at least a year, which is Google’s minimum recommendation, and ideally for good. Old links and bookmarks never entirely go away, and redirects cost almost nothing to keep.

Update everything that points at the old addresses

Redirects are a safety net, not a replacement for correct links. Once the map is agreed:

• Update internal links so menus, buttons and links within your text point straight at the new URLs rather than bouncing through redirects.
• Check canonical tags point to the new live addresses, not the old pages or the development site.
• Submit an XML sitemap of the new URLs in Search Console once the site is live, so Google finds the new pages quickly.
• Update your Google Business Profile website link, and any booking links on it.
• Ask the most important sites that link to you (trade bodies, suppliers, local directories) to update their links.

Protect your Google Ads

Google Ads is affected separately from your organic rankings, and problems there cost money from day one.

• Update final URLs to the new addresses in your ads, sitelinks and other assets, rather than relying on the redirects. An ad whose landing page returns an error can be disapproved under Google’s Destination not working policy, and a redirect that takes people to a different domain breaks the Destination mismatch policy.
• Check your conversion tracking. If enquiries are counted when someone reaches a thank-you page and that page’s address has changed, conversions will quietly stop recording. Make sure the Google tag and your analytics tracking are on the new site too. Our post on conversion tracking mistakes that skew your data covers what to test.
• Watch landing page experience. Google assesses the new pages afresh, so keep an eye on the landing page experience status in your keyword Quality Scores for the first few weeks.

Carry over what nobody can see

Some of the most valuable parts of an old site are invisible on the page:

• Page titles and meta descriptions. Copy across the ones that were working, or improve them on purpose. Don’t let a new theme generate them automatically.
• The content on pages that ranked. If a detailed service page brought in enquiries, keep the detail. A slimmer design can easily lose the words that made the page rank.
• Structured data, such as the markup that tells Google your business name, address and opening hours. It usually has to be added again on a new platform.
• Image alt text and a sensible heading structure on every page.
• Speed. A new site isn’t automatically faster. Heavy animations, large images and page builders can make it slower than the one it replaces, so test key pages before launch. We explain what to look for in why your website is half of your Google Ads campaign.

Launch day and the weeks after

On launch day:

1. Remove any noindex tags and robots.txt blocks left over from development.
2. Test the redirect map. Run the full list of old URLs through a crawler, or check them by hand if there are only a few, and confirm each lands on the right page in one step.
3. Submit the new sitemap in Search Console.
4. Click through every Google Ads final URL, and send a test enquiry to check it’s tracked.

Over the following weeks, check Search Console’s Page indexing report. Rising numbers under “Not found (404)”, “Soft 404” or “Redirect error” usually point to a missed or broken redirect, while “Page with redirect” is expected for the old URLs as Google processes the move. Compare clicks and impressions in the Performance report with the weeks before launch, and check Google Ads for disapproved ads.

A dip for a few weeks is normal. A decline that’s still going after a month or two is a sign to go back through the list above, and the redirect map is the first place to look.

Planning a new website?

It’s far easier to protect your rankings before launch than to win them back afterwards. If you’d like us to check your redirect plan and the technical details before the new site goes live, that’s part of our onsite technical SEO work. Get in touch or call 0330 223 0847.