Website redesign checklist: keep your rankings while you rebuild

A new design is exciting, but a careless rebuild can cost you rankings and leads. Use this checklist to protect your search performance.

Before you start

• Record your current performance: organic traffic, top pages, top queries and conversions.
• Crawl the old site and export every URL, title, description and heading.
• Identify the pages that earn traffic and links. Those pages need extra care.

During the redesign

• Keep strong content. Improve it instead of deleting it.
• Keep URLs the same where possible. When a URL must change, plan a redirect.
• Carry over titles, descriptions, headings and structured data.
• Check mobile layout, speed and accessibility on a staging site before launch.

At launch

• Add 301 redirects from every old URL to its best new match.
• Submit the new sitemap to Google Search Console.
• Make sure the site is not blocked by a leftover noindex tag or robots rule.
• Test forms, tracking and checkout.

After launch

• Watch Search Console daily for the first weeks. Look for crawl errors and drops.
• Fix broken links and missing redirects quickly.
• Compare traffic and conversions with the numbers you recorded.

Planning a redesign? Talk to us first, and we will map the migration before any design starts.