How to redesign a website without losing rankings

A redesign can only protect what has been written down. Before any design work starts, crawl the current site for a list of every address, and export from Google Search Console the pages and searches that bring visitors. Search Console keeps sixteen months of data. Note each page’s title and description, and which pages other websites link to.

Every address that changes needs a permanent redirect, known as a 301, to the page that replaces it. Map old to new one by one, straight to the closest equivalent and in a single hop. Sending every old address to the home page throws away what each page had earned.

Pages rank for the words on them. Where the record shows a page bringing visitors, the new version keeps its subject, its main heading and the sections that answer the searches it appears for. Shorter and cleaner is fine. Cutting the part that ranked is where the traffic goes.

Test sites are normally hidden from search engines with a password or a “noindex” instruction, and rightly. The launch checklist must include taking that block off. A live site still carrying the test site’s block disappears from results within days.

Launch day is when small faults are cheapest to catch.

• Crawl the new site for broken links and missing titles.
• Test the redirects from the full list of old addresses.
• Submit the new sitemap in Search Console.
• Confirm that Analytics and Search Console are still recording.
• Read the robots.txt file and one page’s source for any leftover block.

Google takes days to weeks to recrawl a rebuilt site. Each week, read Search Console’s Pages report for new errors, check the list of pages not found, and compare the searches and pages bringing visitors with the record made before the work began.