Website redesign checklist to keep your search traffic

Export every address the site has by combining a Screaming Frog crawl, the XML sitemap and the pages that received visits or links. Put them all in one sheet. Add columns for visits, inbound links and the purpose of each page.

Mark each page keep, merge, improve or remove. Pages that bring enquiries must survive in some form. Thin pages with no visits and no links can go, but decide that on purpose and write down the reason beside each one.

Save a snapshot of the current state as well. Keep the title tags, H1 headings, meta descriptions and schema markup. After launch you will compare against it.

The URL map is the heart of the project. Each old address needs a destination. A removed page should point to the closest relevant page, never blindly to the home page, because a blanket redirect reads as a soft 404.

Keep addresses unchanged wherever you can. A new design does not demand a new folder structure, and every address you keep is one 301 redirect that you never have to write, test, maintain or debug.

Watch the small things. Trailing slashes, uppercase letters, query strings, PDF downloads and old image files all create broken paths. Ask the developer to test the map against the full export, line by line, before launch.

Run the new site on a private staging address behind a password and a noindex rule. Forgetting that block lets a duplicate copy get indexed, and the confusion between the two versions can last for weeks. Check it twice.

Crawl staging with a tool. Look for missing titles, duplicate headings, broken links, error pages and redirect chains longer than one hop. Then test the forms, the cookie banner, the Tag Manager container and the mobile layout on a real phone.

Compare words, not only looks. Designers shorten text to fit tidy layouts, and the cut copy often held the exact phrases that people typed into search before they found you. Restore it.

Pick a quiet day, never Friday evening. Back up the old site, switch over, remove the noindex rule, load the redirect map and submit the new sitemap in Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Announce nothing yet.

Then test as a visitor. Click twenty old links from your spreadsheet, search for the company name and submit the contact form. Open the live robots.txt file, because a leftover Disallow rule is the classic launch day disaster.

Keep the old site files and the old database export for a few weeks, so that a badly broken section can be restored in an afternoon. Delete nothing yet.

Check Search Console every day for the first fortnight and watch for indexing errors, pages dropped from the index and sudden falls in clicks. Expect a small dip. A cliff is not normal.

Review the list of addresses returning not found and fix each with a redirect. Compare rankings, impressions and visits for your top twenty pages against the pre-launch sheet. Look for patterns.

Fix problems in order of enquiries lost. At the end of the month, write down what changed and what the data said, then close the project.