How to Redesign a Website Without Losing SEO

Decide first whether your URLs will change

The biggest factor in redesign risk is whether the addresses of your pages stay the same. A new look on the same URLs is a small risk. New addresses are a large one. Settle this before anyone opens a design tool.

If the answer is anything other than the first row, ask your designer why. A redesign can change URLs simply because the new system builds addresses differently. Ask whether the setting can be adjusted. Our website migration checklist is the technical runbook for rows two to four. This page covers the decisions that come before it.

Take a snapshot before the designer starts

Once the old site is gone, you cannot recover what it did well. Export these while you still can.

1. Every current URL. Use your sitemap or a crawl.
2. Search Console data. Save your top pages and top queries for as long a period as the report allows.
3. Titles, descriptions and main headings for each page.
4. The pages that produce calls, forms and sales. Your analytics show these.
5. The pages other sites link to. Use a link report from Search Console or an SEO tool.
6. Screenshots of the pages that matter, and a note of where you appear for your main searches.

Keep the files somewhere safe. You will refer to them at launch and again two months later.

Decide the fate of every page

Give each existing page one of four outcomes.

Pages with links from other sites but no traffic should be redirected to the closest match, not deleted. Never redirect a retired page to the home page just to tidy up. Google treats a redirect as a statement that the new page is the replacement, and a poor match helps neither customers nor search engines.

What goes in the designer's brief

Put these requirements in writing before work begins. They cost little to follow at the start and a lot to retrofit.

• Keep existing URLs unless a written reason says otherwise
• Give every page a unique title, description and main heading
• Use real text in the page, not words baked into images
• Make navigation links standard <a href> links, because Google can only discover links built that way
• Show the same content and metadata on mobile as on desktop, because Google indexes the mobile version
• Give images descriptive alt text, set their dimensions and never lazy-load the main image at the top of the page
• Keep the test site out of search with noindex while it is private, and remove that setting at launch
• Hit the Core Web Vitals targets: the main content loading in 2.5 seconds or less, responses to taps in 200 milliseconds or less, and layout shift of 0.1 or less
• Deliver the redirect map two weeks before launch, and carry Search Console and analytics across

For what those speed numbers mean, see our guide to Core Web Vitals.

Who does what

If you have no SEO adviser, the owner takes that column. The technical SEO checklist lists the checks.

Launch week

1. Schedule the launch for a quieter time for your business, as Google recommends for moves.
2. Turn on the redirects and test a sample of old URLs by hand. Each should reach the right page in one step.
3. Confirm the test-site noindex and any robots.txt block are gone.
4. Submit the updated sitemap in Search Console and inspect a few key URLs.
5. Check forms, phone links and analytics work on a real phone.

The first eight weeks

Google says it can take a few weeks or more for new URLs to replace old ones in results for small to medium sites. Its crawl rate may dip right after a launch and then rise over several days. Some movement in traffic is normal during that period.

As a rule of thumb of our own, not a Google rule, treat a sustained drop on pages that kept their URL and content as a sign of an error, and go looking for it. Check every week for eight weeks:

• Impressions and clicks for the pages you listed in the snapshot
• Indexed pages in Search Console
• Crawl errors, redirect chains and soft 404s
• Enquiries from forms and calls

Before you sign the quote

Whether to redesign at all is a separate question from how to do it safely. Our website redesign guide helps you decide, and whether AI can redesign your website has its own answer.

If you go ahead, ask every designer, including us, to itemise the SEO tasks from this page: the snapshot, the redirect map, the launch-day checks and the eight weeks of monitoring. A quote that leaves them out has left out the part that protects your traffic. To discuss a redesign, see our web design service, and for the wider plan around it, read SEO for small business.