How to redesign your website without losing SEO: the checklist

You redesign a website without losing SEO by keeping what already ranks: save a record of your pages before anything changes, keep the URLs and words that bring traffic, and send every URL that must change to its new page with a 301 redirect. Nobody can promise your rankings will hold. Google itself says to expect some movement, so this checklist gives your local business’s pages their best chance of carrying over.

First, work out which change you are making

“New website” can mean four different jobs, and each needs different work.

The table is our summary of Google’s guides. Its Change of Address page says that for pages moving within your site you should “just add redirects, and update your sitemaps as appropriate.”

Aim for the second row. If every address stays the same, a builder change is close to a hosting change, though the pages themselves still change (more on that below).

Google’s advice for a bigger project is “Change only one thing at a time”: a new domain, a new content system and a new layout, one after the other. A new builder usually brings a new layout with it, so you may not be able to split those. A new domain can often wait.

If you are still choosing, what a website should cost covers the options. Ask one thing before you sign: can you set a page’s address and add redirects?

What to save before anything changes

Once the old site is switched off, this is hard to get back. Save it in one dated folder:

• Your pages that get search traffic. In Search Console, open the Performance report, widen the date range to a full year so a slow season does not hide anything, select the Pages tab and export it. Do the same on the Queries tab. The download stops at 1,000 rows, which Google says “might be most or all of your data” on a smaller site.
• Every URL on the site. Google suggests your sitemaps, your analytics for the busiest URLs, and the Links report. Try yoursite.com/sitemap.xml in a browser.
• Pages other sites link to. In the Links report, under External links, Top linked pages shows which of your pages have the most backlinks. Those deserve a redirect even if they get few visits.
• Title, description, main heading and full text of your top pages, next to each URL, plus the photos. The account may close with your subscription.
• Your forms and tracking. List the contact forms, phone tracking and analytics code. None of them move by themselves.

Keep the URLs and the words that rank

If your new builder can publish a page at the same path as the old one, use the same path. A tidier URL is not worth a move.

The words matter just as much. Google says “the most basic signal that information is relevant is when content contains the same keywords as your search query”, especially in headings and body text. If a designer cuts your drain cleaning page to a headline and a photo, the address survives and the reason it ranked does not.

Go through your Queries export, and confirm each top page still:

• Names the job and the town in the words searchers used.
• Keeps the sections that answer the customer’s questions. Here is what goes on a service page.
• Has its own page. Folding six services into one “What we do” page removes the addresses those searches landed on. How many service pages you need covers when a split earns its keep.

How the page is built matters too. Google’s Gary Illyes wrote in 2023 that “when you redesign a site, its rankings in search engines may go nuts”, because search engines use the HTML to understand content. He advised “semantically similar HTML”. For you, real headings stay real headings, and text never becomes a picture of text.

Asked that year whether traffic loss from a revamp can be prevented, Google’s John Mueller answered “No”. Two days later he added that a change “can be a negative, it can be a positive”, and “There is no ‘back to the same’.”

Map every old URL to its new home

Google says: “It’s important to map your old site’s URLs to the URLs for the new site.” Make a spreadsheet with one row per old URL, busiest first. Here is one for an invented plumber; the paths are examples.

Three rules, all from Google:

1. Don’t send everything to the home page. Google warns against redirecting many old URLs to one irrelevant page because it “can confuse users and might be treated as a soft 404 error”. Merging several pages into one real replacement is fine.
2. Let dead pages die properly. A page with no replacement should return a 404 or 410 on the new site.
3. No chains. Point each old URL at its final address. Google follows up to 10 hops but advises going direct.

Use the same sheet to point the links inside the new site at the new URLs.

Where the 301 redirects actually live

A 301 is a permanent redirect: anyone asking for the old address, person or Googlebot, gets sent to the new one. Google recommends server-side permanent redirects (301 or 308) and treats client-side ones as a last resort.

A redirect has to run on whatever answers your domain after the switch.

• Same domain, new builder: the redirects live on the new host. Once your DNS moves, the old host stops getting those visits, so rules set up there do nothing.
• New domain: the redirects live on the old domain, which has to stay registered and pointed at something that can serve them.

Google’s site move guide says to keep redirects “for as long as possible, generally at least 1 year”. Its Change of Address page says at least 180 days. Take the year, and pay for an old domain for at least that long, as Google recommends, so nobody buys it for “malicious purposes”.

If your domain is changing, submit the Change of Address request in Search Console once the redirects are live. You must own both properties.

What happens to your Business Profile link

Your Google Business Profile is separate from your site, and the website link connects them.

• Same domain, linked page keeps its URL: nothing to edit. Click the link on launch day to confirm.
• Domain changes, or the linked page moved: edit the Website field and enter the full URL. Google also asks that Googlebot isn’t blocked on your site.

Don’t leave the profile leaning on a redirect. Google’s guidelines warn against URLs that “redirect or ‘refer’ users” to pages other than the business’s own. That line targets misdirection, but a direct link settles it.

Update the other places that hold your address too. Google’s guide names social profiles and ad campaigns, and asks you to contact sites linking to you, busiest first. We would put local directories on that list. Google says prominence is based partly on “how many websites link to your business”.

What to check in the weeks after

Google says a small to medium-sized site “can take a few weeks for most pages to move”, and that rankings “will settle down over time”. Mueller’s caveat: “There is no specific time or guarantee.” Run this list against what you saved.

A dip alone doesn’t prove something broke. For a drop that doesn’t recover, Google’s debugging guide points to the troubleshooting section of its site move page. Start with the fallen page: does the old URL redirect correctly, is the new page indexed, did its words change?

Rankings also take time for reasons unrelated to the move, which how long local SEO takes explains. If your domain stayed the same and only the host changed, keep the old host until the checks pass. Google’s hosting guide says to shut down once no one is using the old infrastructure. If your domain changed, the old domain has to keep serving its redirects for at least 180 days, and preferably the full year.

If you do one thing this week, export your Pages report and start the spreadsheet.