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What does this blog cover
A new design can look good and still bring your rankings down. This blog explains website redesign SEO in simple steps. It covers what to pay attention to before launching the redesign, how to create a 301 redirect strategy, and what to consider after the new website launches.
Why Rankings Drop After a Redesign
In most cases, there is nothing wrong with the design itself. There are some changes made behind the scenes: a URL becomes shorter, there are deleted pages, there is a rewritten heading which brought the traffic, and/or an accidentally launched noindex tag for a test website.
Google analyses pages on the basis of their URL. In case the URL is changed and there are no references to the new URL, Google loses information about the page.
That is the reason behind most cases of traffic drop after a website redesign.
How to Redesign a Website Without Losing Traffic
The general principle of how to redesign a website without losing traffic is quite simple. Keep everything that works, make necessary changes and create redirects from all existing URLs to new ones. The steps below follow this principle.
- Step 1: Save Your Current Numbers First:
It is important to understand your starting point to see whether the redesign has caused an issue. Export your top pages, queries, clicks and impressions from the Search Console during the last 12 months. Also do the same in Google Analytics and include leads/sales if tracked. At times, traffic remains stable while the number of enquiries drops.
Once done, crawl your website using a tool such as Screaming Frog and export a file.
You get every old URL with its title, H1, canonical and status code. You should keep the file safe because it will be used many times in the future.
- Step 2: Determine Which Pages Should Be Migrated/Modified/Moved
Prioritise your pages by traffic, backlinks and conversions. There are no pages which have to be migrated without exception.
| Page type: | What to do? | Example (made up): |
| High traffic or many backlinks | Keep the URL and most of the content. | A blog post that gets steady visits every month |
| Useful but weak | Improve it and keep the URL. | An old service page with very little text |
| Outdated or duplicate | Merge into a better page and redirect. | Two pages about the same service |
| No traffic, no links, no use | Remove it. | An event page from a few years back |
If a page has no traffic and no links, you can let it go. Google doesn’t need a redirect for pages you are not keeping.
- Step 3: Make Your 301 Redirect Plan
A 301 redirect plan is just a sheet that lists each old URL and the new URL it should go to. It’s simple, but you have to be careful, because one wrong row can send a good page to the wrong place.
Here are some rules to follow:
- Send each old URL to a new page on the same topic.
- If you decide to migrate a page permanently, then a 301 redirect should be used. Google treats 301 redirects as a strong signal and 302 as a weak one.
- Only one hop is allowed in this case.
- Don’t send everything to the homepage, since Google can see that as a soft 404.
- Set redirects on the server and not with JavaScript or a meta refresh.
- Update your internal links so they point to the new URLs.
Here is a small sample of the sheet. The URLs are made up.
| Old URL: | New URL: | Type: | Note: |
| /services/web-design-delhi | /web-design-services | 301 | Same topic, new slug |
| /blog/seo-tips-2022 | /blog/seo-tips | 301 | Merged and updated |
| /contact.php | /contact-us | 301 | CMS change |
| /old-offer-page | none | 410 | No traffic, no links |
How Long to Keep the Redirects?
Google says to keep them as long as you can, and at least one year in most cases. For a medium site, most pages take a few weeks to move in the index, and bigger sites take longer. So even if traffic looks fine in month three, don’t remove them. You also don’t need to put an end date in your 301 redirect plan.
How Do We Work on This at 360 Digital Idea?
At 360 Digital Idea, we do the redesign and the SEO migration together as one project. That includes the audit of the old site, the redirect map, the checks before launch and the monitoring after launch. We use a website migration SEO checklist for this, so we are not trying to remember things on launch day.
If you are hiring someone for a redesign, ask them to show you the redirect map before launch. You can learn a lot from it.
SEO Website Migration Checklist Before the Launch:
The checklist should be used before the launch of the website.
It also works as an SEO checklist for website relaunch because the checks are the same whether you rebuild everything or only a part of the site.
| Check: | Why does it matter? |
| Noindex tags and robots.txt blocks removed on the live site | A leftover noindex is a common launch mistake. |
| Titles, meta descriptions and H1s are kept for pages that rank. | Changing them without checking can change rankings. |
| Canonical tags point to the new live URLs. | Mixed signals make Google guess. |
| The XML sitemap has only new, indexable URLs. | Mixed signals make Google guess. |
| The XML sitemap has only new, indexable URLs. | Old or redirected URLs waste crawl time. |
| Schema markup is still in place. | Redesigns often drop it by accident. |
| Internal links updated | Links to redirected URLs add extra hops. |
| Every row of the redirect sheet tested | One broken row can mean one lost page. |
| Speed and mobile layout checked. | A slow new site can lose what the old one earned. |
| Analytics and conversion tracking are working. | You need clean data to spot problems |
Go through the website migration SEO checklist on the staging site first and then again on the live site. The live check matters more, since some settings change when the site moves.
Launch Day and the First 30 Days.
Launch on a weekday morning when people are around to fix things. If you can, don’t change the domain, platform, URLs and content all on the same day. It’s hard to find the cause if everything changed at once.
After launch, open your top 50 pages and check them by hand, look at the status codes, submit the new sitemap and check robots.txt again. Once the redirects are set up, you can use the Change of Address feature in Google Search Console when you move to a new domain. Check the Pages report in Google Search Console daily for the first week and then weekly. Compare the clicks to the numbers obtained in Step 1. This step is often skipped by many SEO teams because the work is over when the website launches.
What to Do If There Is a Traffic Drop After Website Redesign?
A small dip in the first two weeks is normal because Google needs time to go through your pages again. If the fall is big and keeps going, the cause is usually one of a few things. A traffic drop after a website redesign like that is worth checking in this order:
- Check for noindex and robots.txt blockage on the live website.
- Perform a crawl of the new website for 404s, redirect loops, and 302s.
- Compare your top 20 old pages to the new website and find any missing text or heading changes.
- Check that the canonicals and the sitemap use the new URLs.
- Make sure analytics is working, because sometimes the traffic is fine and the tracking is broken.
Don’t undo the whole design before you go through these. The fix is usually small.
Where Teams Usually Make Mistakes?
Redirects are the biggest one in my view. They get done last, in a hurry, by someone who never looked at the old site’s traffic. Content comes second. Teams cut text to make the page look cleaner, and that text was often why the page ranked.
A written SEO checklist for a website relaunch helps only if one person is responsible for it. At 360 Digital Idea, I like having the SEO person in the first meeting and not at the end.
Conclusion
Website redesign does not need to affect your search rankings negatively. Just save your current statistics, choose which pages will remain the same, create the redirect spreadsheet page-by-page, double-check the list, and monitor traffic for a month.
Knowing how to redesign a website without losing traffic mostly means being careful with the boring parts.
If you want someone to look at your redirect map, you can talk to us at 360 Digital Idea. We do website redesign, SEO and the build together, so the redirects and launch checks are part of the project from the start.
FAQs
Q1. Will a website redesign hurt my SEO?
Not always. Rankings usually stay if the URLs, content and redirects are handled carefully. A small dip for a few weeks can still happen.
Q2. How long will traffic drop last after a website redesign?
It varies by cause. If it is simply recrawl by Google, it will usually stabilise within several weeks for a medium-sized website. If the cause is a lack of redirects or a noindex, it continues until it gets fixed.
Q3. How long should I keep 301 redirects?
As long as you can, and at least one year. Keeping them longer doesn’t cause any harm.
Q4. Should I redirect all old pages to the homepage?
No. Send each old page to the closest matching new page. If there is no good match, it’s better to let the page go than to point it to the homepage.
Q5. What is the difference between 301 and 302?
The difference is whether the move is temporary or permanent. If your URLs have been changed permanently, then a 301 is what you need.
Q6. What should be included in an SEO website relaunch checklist?
The list of URLs to be redirected, your current traffic stats, a list of all existing URLs, your tested redirects file, a check of noindex and robots.txt files, titles and headings, canonical URLs, sitemap, schema markup, internal links, and tracking.
Q7. Do I need to inform Google that I have redesigned my website?
No, you don’t. Just submit your new sitemap and monitor your Search Console.
The Change of Address tool is only for domain moves.
Q8. Can I keep my old URLs to make this easier?
Yes, it is, and it is safer than any other option. If your current URL structure is okay, it eliminates a lot of potential risks for you.
Q9. Do small websites require a website migration SEO checklist?
Yes. A five-page site has fewer things to check, but the risks are the same.
