Redesigning your website without losing your Google rankings

A new website should bring more traffic. Too often it brings less, for months, because the relaunch quietly broke the things search engines relied on: the addresses of pages, the content on them, and the signals pointing at them. None of this is mysterious, and almost all of it is preventable.

We followed this checklist on our own site when we moved techsion.net off WordPress onto a new platform.

Before you design anything: inventory

• Every URL that matters. Export them from Search Console, your analytics and a crawl of the current site. Include old blog posts and PDFs people link to.
• What each one earns. Clicks, impressions, landing-page sessions and conversions. This tells you what you cannot afford to lose.
• Who links to you. The pages with backlinks are worth protecting even if they get little traffic.

Map every old URL to a new one

This is the single most important step. Every old address should do one of three things:

1. Redirect permanently (301) to the most relevant new page — the equivalent page, not the homepage.
2. Stay exactly where it is, if the URL does not need to change. Not changing a URL is the safest redirect of all.
3. Return "gone" (410) if it was spam, junk or genuinely has no replacement, so search engines stop asking.

Avoid redirect chains, where an old URL hops through two or three addresses: each hop costs time and confidence. On our own migration, old WordPress addresses go straight to their new pages in one hop, spam URLs that a previous plugin had generated return 410, and the old article on why businesses need a website now lands on its rewritten replacement.

Keep the content that ranked

Pages often rank because of what they say. A redesign that cuts a 1,200-word service page down to three bullet points and a hero image will lose the searches that page answered. Keep the substance, improve it, and keep page titles and headings aligned with the searches that brought people in.

Carry the technical signals across

• A unique title and meta description on every page.
• Canonical tags, an XML sitemap, and a robots.txt that does not block the live site — staging rules leak into launches more often than you would think.
• Structured data for the organisation, services, articles and breadcrumbs.
• Internal links pointing at the new URLs, not at redirects.
• Speed at least as good as the old site on mobile data — see Core Web Vitals.

Test before the switch

Crawl the staging site. Run every old URL from your inventory against it and check each one returns the right page in one hop. Validate the structured data. Check the site on a real phone. Then launch at a quiet time, not on a Friday evening.

The four weeks after launch

1. Submit the new sitemap in Search Console the same day.
2. Watch the Pages and Crawl stats reports daily for spikes in "not found" or server errors, and fix any URL you missed.
3. Use URL Inspection to request indexing of the most important pages.
4. Compare clicks and impressions week on week. A small dip is normal; a cliff means something was missed.
5. After a few weeks, validate fixes on the old errors so Search Console stops reporting them.

When to bring help in

A site with a few pages can be migrated carefully by one person. A store, a site with years of articles, or a platform change — for instance from WordPress to a custom build — is worth planning with someone who has done it before. That is part of our SEO work and every rebuild we do. Tell us what you are relaunching.