A redesign is one of the riskiest moments for organic traffic. This is the migration process we follow to protect, and usually grow, your visibility.
We've seen businesses lose half their organic traffic overnight after launching a beautiful new website. The design wasn't the problem. The migration was. With the right process, a redesign should protect your rankings and often improve them.
Before you design anything
- Crawl the current site and export every URL, title, and meta description.
- Pull the top pages by traffic, conversions, and backlinks from Analytics and Search Console.
- Benchmark rankings for your most valuable keywords so you can compare after launch.
During design and build
- Keep URLs the same wherever possible. Every changed URL is a risk.
- Preserve the content that's ranking. Improve it, but don't strip it out for a cleaner look.
- Build on a staging site that's blocked from search engines.
- Test Core Web Vitals on real templates before launch, not after.
Launch day
- Implement one-to-one 301 redirects from every old URL to its closest new equivalent.
- Remove staging blocks, submit the new sitemap, and verify tracking is firing.
- Crawl the live site to catch broken links, missing titles, and redirect chains.
The first 90 days
Monitor Search Console daily for the first two weeks, then weekly. Some ranking movement is normal as Google recrawls, but sustained drops on specific pages usually point to a missed redirect or removed content that's easy to fix if you catch it early.
Planning a redesign? We handle the SEO migration as part of every website project, so you get a better site without losing the visibility you've earned.
