Website redesign checklist: how to redesign without losing your Google rankings

A redesign should make your website better for visitors and for Google. Yet traffic often falls after a relaunch, sometimes sharply, because pages that ranked disappeared or moved without redirects. Almost every cause is preventable. This is the website redesign SEO checklist we use to redesign without losing rankings: before, during and after launch.

One question first: why are you redesigning? If the real complaint is that the site doesn't bring in work, diagnose that before you brief a designer. A new look won't fix a site nobody finds, and a site with traffic but no enquiries may need clearer copy and calls to action more than new templates. Our guide to why a website isn't getting enquiries helps you tell the difference.

Before you start designing

1. Take an inventory of every URL

List every page on the current site, not just the ones in the menu. Include old blog posts, landing pages, PDFs and anything linked from other websites. Useful sources:

• Your XML sitemap
• A crawl of the site with an SEO crawler
• Google Search Console → Pages (what Google has indexed)
• Search Console → Performance (which pages actually get clicks)
• Your analytics, for landing pages over the past 12 months

2. Mark which pages matter

For each URL, note its clicks, impressions and backlinks. Pages with traffic or links need special care. Either keep them at the same URL or redirect them to the closest equivalent.

3. Back up the old site

Take a full backup of files and database before anything changes. You'll want it for reference, and as a way back if something goes badly wrong.

4. Record your baseline

Export Search Console performance data and analytics before launch, so you can compare like with like afterwards.

While building the new site

5. Keep URLs that already work

The simplest way to protect rankings is to not change URLs unless there's a good reason. If /services/ ranks well, keep /services/.

6. Build a redirect map for everything that changes

Every old URL that won't exist on the new site needs a 301 (permanent) redirect to the most relevant new page:

• Redirect page to equivalent page, not everything to the homepage. Mass redirects to the homepage are treated like missing pages.
• Avoid redirect chains (A → B → C). Point old URLs straight at the final destination.
• If a page genuinely has no equivalent, let it return a proper 404. That's better than a misleading redirect.

7. Carry over what ranks

Keep the title tags, meta descriptions, headings and body content of pages that perform, or improve them deliberately. Rewriting a well-ranking page from scratch is a gamble.

8. Keep content, don't just keep URLs

A page that loses most of its words in a "cleaner" redesign will usually lose rankings too. Design around the content, not the other way round.

9. Build on a staging site that search engines can't see

Develop on a password-protected or noindex staging copy, so Google doesn't index a half-finished duplicate of your site.

The week of launch

10. Test the redirect map

Before switching over, test every row of your redirect map on staging: each old URL should return 301 in one hop and land on a page that returns 200.

11. Check the technical basics

• Staging noindex and any password protection removed on the live site (the most common and most painful mistake)
• robots.txt allows crawling of the site
• XML sitemap lists the new URLs
• Canonical tags point to the live domain, not staging
• HTTPS works everywhere; the http and www variants redirect to one version
• Analytics and conversion tracking are installed

12. Check mobile and speed

Test key pages on a real phone and in PageSpeed Insights. A redesign is your chance to improve Core Web Vitals; at the very least, don't make them worse.

After launch

13. Submit the sitemap and watch Search Console

Submit the new sitemap in Search Console and watch the Pages report for new "Not found (404)" errors over the following weeks. Any old URL that shows up with traffic or links deserves a redirect.

14. Compare against your baseline

Some movement in the first few weeks is normal while Google recrawls. Compare clicks and impressions for your important pages against the baseline you exported. Investigate anything that doesn't recover.

15. Keep the redirects

Leave 301 redirects in place long term. Old links on other websites keep sending visitors and authority through them for years.

Planning a redesign?

Our website redesign projects are planned around the same steps: a URL inventory and redirect map, with staging checks and post-launch monitoring where appropriate. If you're worried about losing rankings, send us your current website and we'll tell you what needs protecting.