Website redesign: running the project without losing your rankings

A website redesign changes a site's design, structure, content or CMS, and almost always its URLs. It is a chance to modernise the site and improve its rankings, but it is also when a site most easily loses its visibility: pages that disappear, addresses that change without a redirect, external links that end on a 404 error.

This guide follows the project in order, from an SEO point of view. If you are still wondering whether to redesign, start with the reasons and signs that justify a redesign; to bring the right skills together, see how to build the redesign team.

A redesign is decided for specific reasons: a dated design, a site that is hard to evolve, a CMS to replace, an offer that has changed. Write down these goals and what the redesign touches: design only, structure and URLs, content, CMS, domain name. The wider the scope, the greater the risk for SEO and the more the preparation matters. These choices go into the redesign specification, which then serves as the reference for the whole team.

The types of migration help name what changes, and therefore what must be protected. To budget the project, see our article on the cost and quote of a website redesign.

Before designing the new site, take stock of the old one and its rankings. The audit covers three points:

• technical: load times, errors, pages indexed or not, redirects already in place;
• content: its quality, its structure, duplicates, what to keep, rewrite or delete (see our content audit method);
• links: pages that receive links from other sites, and internal linking.

Search Console gives the pages that receive impressions and clicks, and the queries they rank for; a backlink tool gives the pages that receive links. Together, they tell you what the new site must not lose.

A few pages often carry most of the organic traffic and conversions. Find them in Search Console and track them throughout the project: their content must be carried over or improved, not thinned out, and their new address must be known before go-live. A page that ranks well and disappears without an equivalent takes its traffic with it.

Also take care of the internal linking of the redesign: an important page that is no longer linked from the menu or from other pages loses part of its strength, even if its content is identical.

Links from other sites are one of the strongest ranking signals, and they point to specific addresses. If those addresses change without a redirect, the links lead to an error and their value is lost. List the URLs that receive links with a tool such as Majestic or Ahrefs and check that each one will have its redirect. See why backlinks matter during a migration.

The redirect plan maps each old URL to its new address, as a 301. It is what passes the traffic and authority of the old pages on to the new ones. It is prepared before go-live, on the staging site, once the new site exists with its real content.

That is Swan's job: it crawls the old site and the staging site, compares page content and suggests, for each old URL, the closest new page. You approve or correct the suggestions, Swan checks the redirects on staging and then in production, and exports them for your server or CMS.

On the staging site, check the site as visitors and search engines will see it: key pages and their content, title and meta description tags, canonical tags, the robots.txt file (a staging site blocked to robots must not go to production that way), the sitemap, and display on mobile and in the main browsers. Test the redirects: each old URL must lead to its new address in a single hop. Our migration checklist lists these checks.

After go-live, monitor in Search Console the indexing of the new URLs and the errors reported (404s, failing redirects, excluded pages). Submit the new sitemap and fix what is reported without delay. See how to speed up the processing of redirects.

Compare clicks, impressions and rankings in the following weeks with the period before the redesign. A temporary drop is common while Google processes the redirects; a lasting drop on specific pages almost always points to a missing redirect, thinner content or a page that can no longer be found. SEO problems after a redesign details the causes and their fixes.