Redesigning a Website Without Losing Your Rankings

The most common way a redesign loses money is not bad design. It is a launch that quietly breaks the URLs search engines already send traffic to. The fix is unglamorous and takes about half a day of preparation.

Before you start designing

1. Export a full list of current pages and their traffic for the last twelve months.
2. Mark the top twenty pages by visits and by enquiries. These must survive, with their content intact.
3. Record current page titles and descriptions — you will want them as a baseline.
4. Note every page an external site links to; those links are assets.
5. Take a benchmark of load speed and enquiry volume so you can tell afterwards whether the new site is better.

Launch day

• Put a 301 redirect map in place for every changed URL, tested line by line.
• Remove any staging-site blocking rules so the live site can be crawled.
• Check that every page has a unique title, description and canonical URL pointing at itself.
• Submit an updated sitemap and confirm it returns real URLs.
• Test forms end to end from a phone, and confirm the enquiry lands in the inbox someone reads.
• Verify analytics is recording on every template, not just the homepage.

The first fortnight

Watch three things: crawl errors, page speed on mobile, and enquiries per week. A short traffic dip in week one is normal as search engines re-crawl. A dip still present at week four is a problem to investigate, usually a redirect that was missed or a page whose content was cut too heavily.

What good looks like after ninety days

If conversion improved and traffic held, the project worked. If the site looks better and enquiries fell, the copy was probably shortened in the wrong places — usually the pages that answered price and process questions.