How to redesign a website without losing your Google rankings

Before the redesign

List every page you have now

Collect every address on the current site: from its sitemap, from a crawl, and from Google Search Console's pages report, which shows addresses Google knows about that you may have forgotten. Put them in one spreadsheet.

Find the pages that matter

In Search Console's performance report, sort pages by clicks over the last year. Note which pages bring visitors, which have links from other sites and which lead to enquiries. Those are the pages you must not damage.

Decide what happens to each page

For every address, choose: keep at the same address, move to a new address, merge into another page, or remove. Anything that moves, merges or goes needs a redirect to the closest new page. Redirecting everything to the home page is not a plan; Google treats it much like the page vanishing.

During the build

• Keep the content that earns traffic. Improve it if you can, but don't cut it to fit a new design.
• Keep page titles and main headings close to what worked, unless they were poor.
• Build the new site on a test address that search engines are told not to index.
• Write the redirects as a list of old address and new address, page by page.

On launch day

• Remove the "don't index" setting from the new site. Forgetting this is the classic launch-day disaster.
• Switch the redirects on with the new site, and test the important old addresses one by one.
• Check that only one version of each page opens: https, with or without www, consistently.
• Submit the new sitemap in Search Console.
• If the domain changed too, use Search Console's change of address tool. See website migration.

In the weeks after

Watch Search Console's pages report for errors and the performance report for drops on specific pages. Some movement in the first weeks is normal while Google recrawls. A page that drops and stays down usually has a missing redirect, lost content or a technical problem, and can be fixed once you know which.

Keep the redirects permanently. Removing them a few months later to tidy up undoes the work, because old links from other sites and bookmarks still point to the old addresses.

A simple rule

If a page brought visitors before, there should be a page at least as good for the same search after. Design can change completely; that principle shouldn't. My website redesign service is built around it.