This is the checklist to work through before, during and after a website redesign so the new site keeps the Google traffic the old one earned. You'll learn the one decision that sets your risk level, how to build a redirect map, what to check on launch day and what to watch in the weeks after.
A redesign hurts rankings when something Google relies on disappears: the page addresses, the content on pages that rank, or Google's access to the site. Keep your URLs if you can. If they must change, 301 redirect every old URL to its closest new page, keep the text of your top pages, remove any staging block at launch, and watch Search Console for a few weeks. Some ranking movement after a move is normal.
Are your URLs changing?
Answer this before anyone opens a design tool. It decides how much can go wrong.
If every page keeps exactly the same address (same domain, same paths, same http or https), your redesign is a change of templates and content. Google can recrawl the pages it already knows and see the new version. Even switching hosting companies without changing URLs is handled as a smaller job: Google's guide on moving hosting without URL changes says a temporary drop in crawl rate right after launch is normal, followed by a steady increase over the next few days.
If URLs change, Google treats it as a site move. Its site move guide lists three kinds: moving from HTTP to HTTPS, changing the domain name (or merging domains), and changing URL paths, such as example.com/page.php?id=1 becoming example.com/widget. That last one is the kind that sneaks into redesigns without anyone deciding it on purpose.
How URLs change without anyone noticing
- You move platforms, for example from Wix or Squarespace to WordPress, and each platform builds page addresses its own way. If you're weighing a switch, our comparison of WordPress vs Shopify for small businesses covers the bigger picture.
- Someone changes the structure in WordPress under Settings > Permalinks. The WordPress documentation is blunt about it: permalinks "are permanent and should never be changed".
- Pages get renamed for tidiness:
/our-services/kitchen-remodeling/becomes/kitchens/. - Language folders appear, so
/about/becomes/en/about/.
My advice for most small businesses: keep the old URLs unless they're actively broken. A slightly ugly address that already ranks is worth more than a pretty one that has to earn its place again.
Record the old site before anything changes
Once the old site is gone, so is your evidence. Take a full snapshot while it's still live.
- Decide: are the URLs changing?
- Export every URLsitemap and a crawl
- Export top pagesSearch Console Performance report
- Save titles, meta descriptions and headings
- Save the text of your top pages
- Build the redirect mapold URL, new URL, 301
- Block the staging sitepassword or noindex
- Back up the old site
- Remove every staging blocknoindex, "Discourage search engines", Disallow: /
- Turn on 301s and test old URLs
- Check canonical tags use the live domain
- Submit the XML sitemap
- URL Inspection on top pages
- Change of Address toolonly if the domain changed
- Test forms, phone links and tracking
- Check Page indexing every couple of daysNot found (404), Soft 404, Redirect error
- Fix 404s with redirects
- Compare Performance before and after, by page
- Expect some movementGoogle: "a few weeks or more" for medium sites
- Keep redirects for at least a year
Based on Google Search Central's guidance on site moves with URL changes, September 2026.
Google's own advice for a move is to start with your most important URLs from sitemaps, server logs and analytics, then use your CMS to generate a complete listing (see the site move guide). In practice, for a small business site, that means collecting:
- Every URL on the site. Start with the XML sitemap, then run a crawler such as Screaming Frog over the live site, because sitemaps often miss old pages that still get visits.
- Your top pages in Search Console. In the Performance report, switch to the Pages tab, pick a long date range and export. You'll use this list again after launch, since the report lets you filter by URL and compare date ranges.
- The landing pages report from your analytics, which catches pages that get traffic from ads, email or social rather than Google.
- The title, meta description and main heading of every page. Most crawlers export these in one file.
- PDFs, images and other downloads. Google's guide specifically mentions transferring "images and downloads (such as PDF documents)". A price list PDF that ranks is still a page to Google.
- A saved copy of the text on your top 20 pages. If rankings dip later, you'll want to compare old and new wording line by line.
A bakery with 40 products might end up with 70 or 80 URLs once you count categories, the blog and a few forgotten landing pages. That's an afternoon of work, and every later step depends on it.
Build a redirect map
A redirect map is a spreadsheet with one row per old URL and a column for where it goes on the new site. Add a column for the status code and one for "tested". Every URL from your snapshot goes in, including the ones you plan to delete.
The rules for each row
- Point each old URL at the closest matching new page. The old "emergency plumbing" page goes to the new "emergency plumbing" page, not the general services page.
- Use permanent, server-side redirects: 301 or 308. Google's page on redirects and Google Search explains that a permanent redirect is used as a signal that the target should be the canonical URL (the version Google shows in results). A temporary 302 or 307 is followed but not used as that signal.
- Go straight to the final address. Google's crawlers follow up to 10 redirect hops, but the site move guide advises redirecting to the final destination directly. If an old redesign already redirected A to B, and B now moves to C, change A to point at C.
- Don't send everything to the homepage. Google warns that redirecting many old URLs to the homepage "can confuse users and might be treated as a soft 404 error", meaning Google treats it as a missing page anyway.
- If a page is truly gone with no replacement, let it return a 404 or 410. Google says URLs that return a 4xx status code are removed from the index. That's the honest answer for a discontinued service.
- Keep the redirects for as long as possible. The site move guide says "generally at least 1 year". I'd leave them in place for good; they cost nothing.
| Old URL | Redirects to | Status | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| /services/drain-cleaning.html | /drain-cleaning/ | 301 | Good: one hop, closest match |
| /blog/2019/fix-leaky-tap/ | /blog/fix-leaky-tap/ | 301 | Good: same content, new path |
| /water-heaters/ | /heaters/ then /water-heater-repair/ | 301, 301 | Bad: a chain, point it straight at the final page |
| /boiler-service/ | / | 301 | Bad: homepage catch-all, may count as a soft 404 |
| /contact-us/ | /contact/ | 302 | Bad: temporary redirect for a permanent change |
| /winter-offer-2021/ | none | 410 | Fine: expired offer with no replacement |
Swipe sideways to see the whole table.
Use 301 or 308 for permanent moves and keep them for at least a year. Source: Google Search Central, redirects and Google Search.
On WordPress, a redirect plugin such as Redirection handles this well for small sites, and it lets you pick the status code per rule. Check that setting on every rule. The wrong code is one dropdown away.
Once redirects exist, update your own internal links to the new URLs anyway. Google's guide says to change internal links on the new site from old URLs to new ones. Redirects are there for outside links and bookmarks.
Keep the content and signals that already rank
This is where good-looking redesigns quietly lose traffic. The URLs are fine, the redirects work, and three months later the service pages have slipped because their text was cut to make the layout cleaner.
If your old "commercial cleaning" page had 900 words answering pricing questions, frequency, and which buildings you cover, and the new one has a hero image and 60 words, you've removed the reason it ranked.
Restyle the text on your top pages, break it into sections, reorder it, but don't delete it because it doesn't fit the mockup.
What to carry over page by page
- Body text on any page that gets search clicks. Check which queries each page ranks for in the Performance report (filter by that page) and make sure the new version still answers them.
- Title tags and meta descriptions on top pages. Rewrite them only with a reason.
- One clear main heading per page that still contains the words people search for.
- Internal links. New menus are often shorter, and pages that used to be linked from every page end up linked from nowhere. Add them to the footer, a services hub or related-content blocks.
- Image alt text (the short description of an image for screen readers and search engines). Images uploaded fresh for the new design usually arrive with none.
- A self-referencing canonical tag on each new URL, as the site move guide recommends. Google describes canonical tags and redirects as strong signals for which URL should appear in results.
Don't make the new site slower
Redesigns tend to add weight: sliders, background video, animation libraries, three font families. Google's Core Web Vitals give you a target to test against. According to web.dev, a good experience means Largest Contentful Paint (how fast the main content appears) within 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint (how fast the page reacts to a tap) of 200 milliseconds or less, and Cumulative Layout Shift (how much things jump around) of 0.1 or less, measured at the 75th percentile of page loads. Test the staging site on a phone. If the site is already live and feels slow, this guide to checking and fixing a slow website sets out what to fix first.
Use the redesign to fix thin pages
A redesign is the cheapest moment to clean up. A clinic in Riyadh with eight near-identical pages for "teeth whitening", "whitening prices", "best whitening" and so on is better served by one strong page that covers all of it, with the other seven 301 redirected to it.
The trade-off: check the numbers before merging. If one of those thin pages brings in calls every week, leave it alone and improve it instead.
Keep the staging site out of Google
The staging site is the private copy where the new design is built. If Google indexes it, you get a duplicate of your own site in search results, sometimes with placeholder text. So it needs to be blocked, and the block needs to come off at launch.
There are three common ways to do it, and they're not equal:
- Password protection is the most reliable. Google's robots.txt guide names password protection as a proper way to keep content out.
- A
noindextag tells Google to drop the page from search results. On WordPress, the checkbox under Settings > Reading, "Discourage search engines from indexing this site", asks search engines not to index the site. The WordPress documentation notes that it doesn't block access; it's up to search engines to honor the request. - A robots.txt block on its own is the weakest. Google says robots.txt "is not a mechanism for keeping a web page out of Google", and a blocked page can still show up if other pages link to it. Worse, if a page is blocked by robots.txt, Google never sees its noindex tag.
Whichever method you use, the risk is the same: the setting gets copied to the live site. A WordPress site copied from staging often brings its settings along, including that Reading checkbox. Google's site move guide says it plainly: remove any noindex or robots.txt blocks that were only needed for the migration.
The day you block the staging site, add "remove staging block" as the first line of your launch checklist. Name the person who will check it, and have them look at the live site's source code for a noindex tag and at yourdomain.com/robots.txt within an hour of launch.
Launch day, step by step
Pick a quiet day. Google suggests timing a move for when traffic is lower, and I'd add: not a Friday afternoon, when nobody will be around to fix a broken redirect until Monday.
- Take a full backup of the old site and keep a copy you can restore.
- Put the new site live.
- Remove every staging block: uncheck "Discourage search engines" in Settings > Reading, check that no page carries a noindex tag it shouldn't, and open
/robots.txtto confirm there's noDisallow: /line. - Switch on the redirects and test the whole map. Paste the old URL list into your crawler's list mode and confirm each one returns a single 301 to a page that loads with a 200 (the "OK" code).
- Check that canonical tags point to the live domain, not the staging address.
- Submit the new XML sitemap in Search Console. A sitemap can hold up to 50,000 URLs or 50MB, and Google calls submission "merely a hint", so it helps discovery without forcing anything. If your URLs changed, the site move guide suggests submitting both the old and the new sitemaps.
- Run the URL Inspection tool on the homepage and your top pages. Use the live test, then request indexing. Google says indexing "typically takes only a day or so" but can take much longer, and there's a daily limit, so spend it on the pages that matter.
- If, and only if, the domain changed, use the Change of Address tool in Search Console. It needs a 301 from the old homepage to the new one and doesn't apply to HTTP to HTTPS moves or to path changes on the same domain.
- Test the things that make money: submit the contact form and confirm the email arrives, tap the phone number on a mobile, place a test order, and check that analytics and conversion tracking fire.
- If URLs changed, update the website link on your Google Business Profile, social profiles and any running ads.
The first two to six weeks after launch
Google's site move guide says to expect temporary ranking fluctuation during a move, and that for medium-sized sites "it can take a few weeks or more" for Google to start showing the new URLs instead of the old ones. Larger sites take longer. So a wobble in week one isn't a verdict. Your job in this period is to catch real faults early.
What to check and how often
- In the first week, look at the Page indexing report every couple of days. Watch for rising counts under "Not found (404)", "Soft 404", "Redirect error", "URL blocked by robots.txt" and the noindex reason. A rise in "Page with redirect" is expected: those are your old URLs doing their job.
- Check your redirect plugin or server log for 404s. Every URL that shows up there with real visits deserves a redirect.
- From week two, use the Performance report's Compare option to put the weeks since launch next to the same number of weeks before. Filter by page and go down the top-pages list you exported.
- Spot-check the top pages with URL Inspection to confirm Google has picked up the new URL as the canonical.
If Google hasn't picked up the site at all after a couple of weeks, the problem is usually access rather than ranking. Our guide on why a website isn't showing up on Google walks through those checks.
If traffic drops
Look at the shape of the drop before changing anything.
A sharp, site-wide fall within days points to something technical: a noindex left on, a robots.txt block, redirects that return 302 or loop, or a server that errors when Googlebot crawls heavily. Google's site move guide notes that it will crawl a moved site more heavily than usual for a while, so a cheap hosting plan can struggle right when it matters.
A slower slide on specific pages points to content. Pull up the saved copy of the old page and compare it with the new one. Usually a section that answered a common question is gone, the title changed, or the page lost its internal links. Put the missing piece back.
If the technical checks are clean and it's week two, wait. Rewriting every page in a panic resets the clock. If key pages are still well down after about six weeks and nothing technical explains it, restore the old content on those pages first, then look further.
Common mistakes and where money gets wasted
Mistakes that cost rankings
- Redirecting every old URL to the homepage to "keep the link value". Google may treat it as a soft 404.
- Using 302 redirects for a permanent change because that was the plugin default someone didn't check.
- Launching with the WordPress "Discourage search engines" box still ticked.
- Deleting the old blog because it looks dated, including the three posts that brought in half the enquiries.
- Changing URLs for looks alone.
- Forgetting PDFs, image URLs and old campaign landing pages in the redirect map.
- Removing the redirects a year later during a hosting change, while old links elsewhere still point to them.
Usually a waste of money
A large "SEO migration audit" package for a 15-page site where the URLs aren't changing. That job is a crawl, a spreadsheet and an afternoon of checks.
Paid "instant indexing" services. Google's own tools are a sitemap and URL Inspection, and they're free.
Rewriting every title and meta description on the site as part of the redesign. Change the ones on weak pages. Leave the ones that already get clicks.
A new domain for branding reasons when the old one works fine. It turns a design project into a full domain move, with the Change of Address tool, a year or more of redirects and a longer recovery. After a real rebrand it can be worth it. Otherwise, rarely.
Where this checklist doesn't apply: if your current site gets almost no search traffic, there's little to protect. Spend the effort on building good pages instead. And if you're still budgeting the project, our guide to what a small business website should cost shows where redesign money usually goes.
Getting help with a redesign
BerdisDev designs and rebuilds business websites, mostly on WordPress, and we plan the redirect map, staging protection and launch checks from the start. If you'd like someone to watch Search Console and fix issues in the weeks after launch, that's what our website care plans cover. If you have a redesign coming up, send us your current site and we'll tell you if your URLs need to change and what that means for your traffic.
Frequently asked questions
Will a new website affect my SEO?
It can, in either direction. If your URLs stay the same and your top pages keep their content, most sites see little change beyond some short-term movement. The damage usually comes from changed URLs without redirects, text cut from ranking pages, or a staging block left on at launch. A redesign that makes pages faster and clearer can also help, but it's not guaranteed.
How long does it take for rankings to settle after a redesign?
Google says to expect temporary fluctuation during a site move, and for medium-sized sites it can take a few weeks or more for the new URLs to replace the old ones in results. Large sites take longer. If URLs didn't change, things usually settle faster. Watch the Page indexing and Performance reports in Search Console during that period.
How long should I keep 301 redirects after a redesign?
Google's site move guide recommends keeping redirects for as long as possible, generally at least one year. For a domain change, the Change of Address help page says at least 180 days, longer if the old URLs still get traffic. For a small business site, there's rarely a reason to remove them at all.
Should I use 301 or 302 redirects after a redesign?
Use 301 (or 308) for anything that has moved for good. Google uses a permanent redirect as a signal that the new URL should be the one shown in search. A 302 or 307 is followed, but not used as that signal. Save temporary redirects for things like a short maintenance page or a seasonal promotion.
Do I need Google's Change of Address tool for a redesign?
Only if you're moving to a new domain or subdomain, for example from oldname.com to newname.com. It isn't used for HTTP to HTTPS moves, for changing page paths on the same domain, or for a redesign where the domain stays the same. It also needs a 301 redirect from the old homepage to the new one before it will work.
Can I change my WordPress permalinks during a redesign?
You can, but every existing post and page gets a new URL, so you'll need a redirect for each one. WordPress's own documentation says permalinks should never be changed. If the current structure works, even if it includes dates or looks a bit untidy, leave it and put the design budget somewhere visitors will notice.
Sources (15)
- Site moves with URL changes (Google Search Central)
- Changing hosting without URL changes (Google Search Central)
- Redirects and Google Search (Google Search Central)
- How HTTP status codes and network errors affect Google Search
- Consolidate duplicate URLs / canonical (Google Search Central)
- Build and submit a sitemap (Google Search Central)
- Introduction to robots.txt (Google Search Central)
- Block search indexing with noindex (Google Search Central)
- Change of Address tool (Search Console Help)
- Page indexing report (Search Console Help)
- URL Inspection tool (Search Console Help)
- Performance report (Search Console Help)
- Web Vitals (web.dev)
- Settings Reading Screen (WordPress.org)
- Customize permalinks (WordPress.org)