Every week, businesses launch beautiful new websites and watch their search traffic fall off a cliff. The redesign didn’t have to cost them their rankings. The migration did. Here’s how to rebuild without starting over in Google’s eyes.
Inventory what already ranks
Before anything changes, list the pages that earn your traffic and the terms they rank for (Search Console makes this free). These pages are assets. The redesign must preserve their content, their intent and, via redirects, their addresses.
Redirect every URL that changes
Any page whose address changes needs a permanent (301) redirect from old to new. Skip this and every link, bookmark and ranking pointing at the old URL dies. Map redirects one-to-one; sending everything to the homepage tells Google the old pages are gone.
Keep content parity on money pages
A visual refresh is safe; silently deleting the copy that earned a ranking is not. Rewrite for clarity and conversion, but keep the substance that made the page rank: the topics, questions and detail.
Upgrade the technical layer while you’re in there
A rebuild is the cheapest moment to fix what the old site lacked: proper heading structure, meta descriptions, structured data, image alt text, fast Core Web Vitals. (Our own rebuilds typically cut page weight by more than half.)
Launch, verify, watch
After launch: submit the new sitemap, crawl the site for broken links, and watch Search Console for spikes in errors. Catching a bad redirect in week one is a fix; discovering it in month three is a recovery project.
Planning a rebuild or a WordPress migration? See how Skroll handles redesigns or talk to us first. It’s cheaper than a rescue.
