The Website Redesign SEO Checklist: How to Launch a New Site Without Losing Your Rankings

The biggest risk in a website redesign is not the design. It is launching a beautiful new site and watching the search traffic the old one spent years earning disappear in a week, because the pages moved and nobody told Google where they went.

It happens constantly, and it is entirely preventable. This checklist is the process we follow on every redesign, written for the business owner so you can hold any designer to it, including us.

Before the redesign starts

1. Make a complete list of every page on the current site

Not the pages in the menu. Every page: old blog posts, landing pages from a campaign three years ago, the staff page you forgot existed, PDF downloads, image galleries. Pull the list from the current sitemap, from Google Search Console's pages report and from a crawl with a tool such as Screaming Frog. Then compare the three, because each will have pages the others missed. This list is the foundation for everything that follows.

2. Find out which pages actually bring in visitors

Open Google Search Console and Google Analytics and sort the pages by clicks over the last twelve months. Most sites discover that a handful of pages bring in most of the search traffic, and sometimes they are not the pages anyone expected. A single old blog post may be worth more than the homepage. These pages get protected: their addresses, their titles and the content that earned the ranking stay.

3. Note which pages have links pointing to them

Links from other websites, directories, your Google Business Profile and social profiles are part of why your pages rank. Search Console's links report shows which of your pages other sites link to. Those pages must either keep their addresses or redirect, so that every link still lands somewhere live after launch.

4. Record the current titles and descriptions

Export the page titles and meta descriptions of the current site. The ones on pages that rank are assets, not drafts. You will improve the ones that are not working and keep the ones that are, and you need the originals to compare against after launch.

5. Take a baseline

Write down the numbers you will judge the redesign by: organic visitors a month, the rankings for your ten most important searches, calls and form fills from the site. Without a baseline, every disagreement after launch is a guess. Our free website grader gives you a 0 to 100 score for speed, SEO, accessibility and security that is easy to compare before and after.

During the build

6. Keep page addresses where you can

The safest redirect is the one you do not need. If the new site keeps the same address for a page, nothing has to be done for it. Change addresses only when there is a reason: a structure that no longer makes sense, or an address that was never good. Then plan the new structure on paper before anything is built.

7. Map every old address to a new one

Take the complete list from step one and write the new destination next to every address that is changing. Each old page goes to its direct replacement, not to the homepage. A page about fence installation redirects to the new fence installation page. If a page has no replacement because the service is gone, send it to the closest related page. Redirecting everything to the homepage tells Google the old pages are gone and throws away what they earned.

8. Keep the content that ranks

Pages that bring in visitors keep the words that earned those visits. Improve the design around them, tighten the writing, add photos, but do not rewrite from scratch a page that is already working. Pages that have never worked are the ones to rewrite, and if you want new copy throughout, copywriting is available per page or as part of the Small Business plan.

9. Carry over the titles that rank, and fix the rest

Using the export from step four, put the titles and descriptions that rank onto their new pages unchanged. Then improve the ones that were not working. Write every title for the person searching, with the service and the place in it, and keep it under about 60 characters so Google shows the whole thing.

10. Build it fast and mobile first

A redesign is the one chance to fix speed and mobile problems at the root instead of patching them. Design for the phone first, since that is where most visitors are. Serve images at the size they are displayed, avoid heavy page builders and plugins, and test on a real phone over a cell connection, not on an office computer. This is where a redesign usually improves rankings rather than just preserving them.

11. Keep the structure Google already understands

Headings in order, one H1 per page, a clear menu, breadcrumbs, a sitemap, descriptive alt text on images and the structured data that tells Google what the business is and where it is. These are the parts of a site a visitor never sees and Google reads first.

12. Keep the new site out of Google until launch

While the new site is being built at a temporary address, it must be blocked from search engines, or Google will find two copies of your content and rank neither well. And the moment it launches, that block must come off, which is the single most common launch day mistake: a new site that quietly tells Google not to index it.

Launch day

13. Put the redirects in place at the moment of launch

The redirect map from step seven goes live at the same time the new site does, not the next week. Every old address should return a permanent (301) redirect to its replacement, in one hop. Chains of redirects, where an old address bounces through two or three others before arriving, should be collapsed into one.

14. Submit the new sitemap and remove the noindex

Confirm the new site is open to search engines, then submit the new sitemap in Google Search Console. This tells Google to recrawl the site now rather than whenever it gets around to it.

15. Check every old address

Crawl the old list of pages and confirm each one redirects where it should. Then crawl the new site and confirm there are no broken links, no pages returning errors and no page still blocked from indexing. Click the links from your Google Business Profile, your directory listings and your social profiles and confirm each one lands on a live page.

After launch

16. Watch Search Console for two weeks

Search Console reports crawl errors, pages that returned a "not found" and indexing problems within days. Fix anything it flags the day it appears. Some movement in rankings during the first couple of weeks is normal as Google recrawls. A sharp drop that lasts means something on this list was missed, and the redirects are the first place to look.

17. Compare against the baseline at 30 and 90 days

Pull the same numbers from step five. Organic visitors, the ten rankings, calls and forms. A redesign done this way usually shows the same or better at 30 days and better at 90, because the new site is faster and better organized than the old one.

18. Keep the old domain and hosting for a while

If the redesign moved to a new domain or a new host, keep the old ones running with the redirects in place for at least a year. Links to the old addresses will keep arriving long after launch, and each one that still redirects is a visitor and a ranking signal kept.

How we do it

Every item on this list is part of our website redesign service: we list every page, redirect every old address, keep the titles and content that rank and check for broken links after launch. It is written into our custom website pricing, and it is the same process we use when we take over a site from another designer. Most redesigns launch within 4 to 8 weeks, and the price and launch date are in writing before anything is built.

Before you start, run your current site through the free website grader so you know what you are starting from. Then send us the address of your site and what you wish it did better. Jason replies in under 24 hours.