Redesign your website without losing Google rankings - concrete steps to keep your existing organic traffic.
Why 70% of redesigns are an SEO mistake
The usual story: you have a 5-year-old site with stable monthly traffic, you order a redesign, the new agency builds a nice new site, launches it - and three months later traffic is down 40%. Why? The URLs changed, titles and meta descriptions were rewritten 'to be shorter', internal links were cut back, and Google saw all of that as lost signals.
Every redesign carries SEO risk. A good process brings it down to zero; a bad one maximizes it.
Before the redesign: an SEO snapshot
- Export all current URLs from Google Search Console and the sitemap - the list of pages to keep.
- Export the top 50 pages by traffic from GA4 / Search Console - these we keep at all costs.
- A list of the top keywords you rank for - so we know which topics and pages matter.
- Export internal links (Screaming Frog, free for up to 500 URLs) - the structure of internal linking.
- Back up all meta tags, titles and descriptions - they often don’t come back the same.
During the redesign: 7 rules
- Keep the URL structure wherever you can. Don’t change /blog/ to /news/ 'because it looks nicer'.
- For every changed page, set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one. Not a 302, not a meta refresh.
- Carry over the title and meta description if they worked. If they didn’t, write new ones, but deliberately.
- Keep the H1 and main H2 topics - Google uses them for relevance.
- Keep or improve internal links - don’t trim the structure.
- Image alt tags stay, and change only if they become more informative.
- Schema markup (JSON-LD): check that it still exists on every page.
After the redesign: 30 days of monitoring
For the first 2-4 weeks after launch, check Google Search Console daily for 404 errors (a sign of missing redirects), the index coverage report and Core Web Vitals. Rankings will drop 10-20% in the first 1-2 weeks while Google reindexes - that’s normal. If they haven’t recovered after 6 weeks: an in-depth diagnosis.
Next steps
We offer website redesign with SEO migration as a separate package. See also our SEO and growth service. For an SEO audit of your existing site before you start a redesign: write to us.