Redesigning your website without losing your Google rankings

A redesign should bring more enquiries, not fewer. Yet many businesses watch their search traffic fall after launching a beautiful new site. In almost every case I have looked at, the cause was not the design. It was something that went missing on the way.

Before you change anything

1. List every URL you have now. Crawl the current site and export the list. Add URLs from your sitemap and from Google Search Console, which often shows pages you forgot existed.
2. Find the pages that matter. In Search Console, export the pages that receive clicks and the queries they rank for. In your analytics, note which pages lead to enquiries. Note which pages other sites link to.
3. Record a baseline. Write down clicks, impressions, top queries and enquiries for the last three months. Without this, nobody can say whether the launch helped or hurt.
4. Decide what happens to each page. Keep, merge or remove. Pages that bring traffic or enquiries keep their content, even if it gets a new design.

While the new site is built

• Make a redirect map. Every old URL that is changing gets a permanent (301) redirect to the closest new page. Do not send everything to the home page.
• Keep the words that rank. If a page ranks for "boutique hotel in Galle", the new page needs to say that just as clearly. Shorter, vaguer copy is the most common cause of quiet losses.
• Carry over titles, descriptions and headings for pages that perform well, and improve the rest.
• Keep structured data. If the old site had business, product, review or article markup, the new one needs it too.
• Keep the staging site private. Protect it with a password, so Google does not index a half-built copy.
• Check speed and mobile layout on real phones, not just on a fast office computer.

On launch day

1. Remove any "noindex" tag or password left over from staging. This one mistake has sunk more launches than any other.
2. Check robots.txt does not block the site.
3. Test the redirect map: every old URL should land on the right new page, in one hop.
4. Submit the new sitemap in Search Console.
5. Confirm analytics and enquiry tracking work, so you can measure from day one.

The weeks after launch

Some movement in rankings for a few weeks is normal while Google recrawls the site. What matters is the trend. For the first two months, check Search Console every week for pages that cannot be found, pages that dropped out of the index, and queries that lost clicks, and fix problems as soon as you see them.

Google's guidance on site moves says to keep redirects for as long as possible, and generally at least a year, so it can transfer the signals from old URLs to new ones. I keep them permanently, because old links in emails and on other sites never fully disappear.

The mistakes behind most drops

• Old URLs left to return "page not found", or all redirected to the home page.
• Detailed service pages merged into one vague page.
• A noindex tag carried over from staging.
• Important text moved into images, sliders or tabs that load late.
• A new site that is slower than the old one.

Written by Vish Jay

I design and build websites, online stores and business systems for clients in the US, UK, Europe, Australia and Canada, from Colombo, Sri Lanka. When you work with iVishwa, you talk to me directly, from the first call to launch and after.