How to keep your Google rankings when you redesign your website

A website redesign is usually thought of as a design job. But if a site has been live for years, it has a history with Google: indexed pages, the searches it shows up for and the links it has earned from other sites. If the redesign doesn't protect that history, the new site may struggle to find visitors, however much better it looks.

Why do redesigns lose rankings?

• URLs change and the old ones return errors, so the pages Google knows suddenly disappear.
• Content that brought traffic is cut or scattered across other pages during simplification.
• Page titles and descriptions are left empty, or are the same on every page.
• The new site is slower or has problems on mobile.
• The "hidden from search engines" setting of the staging site goes live and the site drops out of search.

Before you start: take stock

The first job is to record what you have today. We list every URL on the site and note, from Search Console, the pages with the most impressions and clicks and the searches they appear for. Pages that earn links from other sites go on the list too. When we shape the new site's structure, we treat these pages as assets to protect.

Every old URL needs a match

If URLs are changing, each old URL should point to the closest new page with a permanent (301) redirect. Sending every old URL to the home page looks easy, but Google often treats that as a lost page. Redirects shouldn't chain either; an old URL should reach its new address in a single step.

When we redesigned our own site, we mapped every old URL to its new counterpart one by one; for example, the old Turkish pages now redirect to their new addresses under /tr.

Redesign without throwing content away

The text of a page that brings traffic shouldn't be deleted just because it doesn't fit the new design. You can rewrite it, simplify it or move it into a better structure; what matters is that the page keeps answering the question it answers today. Write titles and descriptions for each page separately as well.

The technical basics

• A unique title and meta description for every page.
• Canonical URLs for similar pages, and language tags (hreflang) on multilingual sites.
• An up-to-date sitemap and a correct robots.txt file.
• Structured data for your organisation, services and FAQs.
• Pages that load fast and work fully on mobile.

Launch day and after

On launch day we submit the sitemap to Search Console, request indexing for the key pages and test the redirects one by one. Some movement in rankings during the first weeks is normal. In that period we watch Search Console's error reports and not-found URLs, and fill in any missing redirects.

Nobody can guarantee rankings. But these steps make sure your new site doesn't have to start from zero.

How we work

On corporate websites we handle the design and the technical basics together, as one team; this checklist is part of every redesign we do. We use AI actively in every step of our process, which lets us do meticulous work such as URL mapping faster and with more control. More on our web design agency page.

Planning a redesign? We can look at where your site stands in an intro call.