A new website should be good news. Yet a redesign is the single most common way businesses destroy their own Google rankings. The site looks better, the phone goes quiet, and nobody connects the two. It is entirely avoidable if you follow a process.
Why rankings disappear
Google does not rank your business. It ranks individual page addresses. When a rebuild changes those addresses, for example from /our-services/ to /services, Google sees the old page vanish and a stranger appear. Any ranking, and any link from another website to the old address, is lost unless you tell Google where the page went.
The checklist
- List every address on the old site before you touch anything. Your sitemap, Google Search Console and the Wayback Machine will each find pages the others miss. When we moved our own site, Search Console revealed several old pages with real search traffic that did not appear anywhere else.
- Find out which pages actually matter. Search Console shows which pages get impressions and clicks. Those are the ones you cannot afford to lose.
- Map every old address to its closest new equivalent, and set up permanent (301) redirects. Not everything to the home page: each old page should go to the most relevant new one.
- Keep what is working. If a page ranks well, carry its content, title and headings across. A redesign is a bad time to rewrite your best-performing page from scratch.
- Carry over the technical basics: page titles, descriptions, canonical tags, structured data and a fresh sitemap.
- Check how Google Search Console was verified. If it was verified through the old website, for example by a plugin, that verification disappears with the old site. Verifying through your domain's DNS survives any rebuild.
- Test the redirects before and after launch. Every one of them.
- Submit the new sitemap and watch Search Console closely for the next month. A short wobble is normal. A steady decline means something was missed.
What about the old content you do not want?
Not every old page deserves a new home. If a page has no traffic and no relevance to what you do now, let it go. But if it has traffic, redirect it somewhere sensible rather than letting visitors hit an error page.
The short version
A migration done properly should hold your rankings and usually improves them, because the new site is faster and better structured. Done carelessly, it can undo years of progress in an afternoon. Every site we build includes this process as standard. You can read more about how we work on our web design page.