Website redesign checklist: how to keep your SEO intact

A new website should bring more business, not less. Yet redesigns and platform migrations are among the most common reasons for a sudden fall in search traffic. The cause is rarely the new design itself. It is the things that quietly go missing in the move: old URLs with no redirects, removed content, changed titles and broken internal links.

The good news is that almost all of this is preventable with some planning. Here is the checklist we use.

Before you start: record what is working

1. Export every URL on the current site. Crawl it and also pull URLs from your XML sitemap, Search Console and analytics, because some important pages are only found that way.
2. Record which pages bring traffic and leads. From Search Console and analytics, note the pages with organic clicks, conversions and backlinks from other sites. These are the pages you cannot afford to lose.
3. Save titles, meta descriptions and headings for those key pages.
4. Benchmark performance: organic clicks by page, rankings for key searches and Core Web Vitals. You will compare against these after launch.

During design and build

• Plan the new URL structure early. Keep URLs that don’t need to change. Every changed URL needs a redirect.
• Keep the content that ranks. A shorter, prettier page with half the useful information will often rank worse. Improve key pages; don’t strip them.
• Design navigation and internal links deliberately, so important pages stay within a few clicks of the homepage.
• Build SEO into the templates: editable titles and descriptions, one H1 per page, canonical tags, structured data and image alt text.
• Protect the staging site with a password, not just a noindex tag, and make sure that tag doesn’t come across to the live site.
• Check speed on real content, not just the empty design.

The redirect map

This is the single most important document in a migration: a spreadsheet mapping every old URL to its closest new equivalent.

Rules of thumb: use permanent (301) redirects, point each old URL directly at its final destination (no chains), and avoid redirecting everything to the homepage, which search engines tend to treat as a missing page.

Launch day

• Remove staging blocks: noindex tags, password protection and robots.txt disallow rules.
• Test a sample of redirects, including your top traffic pages.
• Submit the new XML sitemap in Search Console.
• Confirm analytics and conversion tracking fire on the new site. Our conversion tracking checklist covers the details.
• Check that canonical tags point to the new URLs, not the old domain or staging.

The first weeks after launch

• Watch Search Console daily at first for crawl errors, 404s and indexing changes.
• Compare organic clicks for key pages against your benchmark.
• Fix any 404s that receive traffic or links with new redirects.
• Expect some movement in rankings for a few weeks as search engines process the changes. A steady fall over several weeks is a signal to investigate. Our guide to diagnosing a traffic drop walks through it.

The short version

Know what is working before you start, keep it, redirect every changed URL properly, and watch closely after launch. Involving SEO at the planning stage costs far less than repairing lost rankings afterwards.

We plan redirects, content and technical SEO into every website design and development project. If you are planning a redesign, talk to us before the build starts.