Before you startRedirectsLaunch dayFirst fortnight
The website redesign checklist that protects your traffic.
Redesigns fail in a predictable way: new site launches, organic traffic falls by half, nobody notices for six weeks, and by then the cause is hard to trace. Almost all of it is preventable with a list. Here is ours — use it on us, or on whoever you hire.
Before design starts
Six things that must exist before anyone draws anything.
- A full URL inventory. Every page currently on the site, exported. Your sitemap, your CMS and a crawl will each miss something different, so use all three.
- Traffic and link data against each URL. Search Console for clicks and impressions over twelve months; any backlink tool for external links. This list decides what is protected.
- Your top 20 pages, marked untouchable. Not undesignable — but their URL, title and heading structure do not change without a specific reason.
- Current Core Web Vitals recorded. So you can prove afterwards that the new site is faster, rather than argue about it.
- A note of every form, tracking script and integration. These are what silently break: the analytics tag, the pixel, the CRM connection, the booking embed.
- Agreement on what the site is for. One action a visitor should take. Without it, a redesign becomes a taste argument.
The redirect map
The single highest-risk item in the project.
- One row per old URL, with its new destination. Every row filled in — no blanks left for later.
- One-to-one, closest equivalent. An old service page goes to the new service page, not to the services index and never to the homepage.
- 301, not 302. Permanent, so the equity transfers rather than being held in escrow indefinitely.
- No chains. Old URL to final URL in one hop. A redirect pointing at another redirect loses value and slows the page.
- Include the ugly ones — old query strings, /index.html variants, trailing-slash duplicates, uppercase paths.
- Test the map before launch, on staging, not by clicking a few links after the site is live.
Carry over the technical work
The things that were doing quiet work on the old site.
- Title tags and meta descriptions for the pages that rank. Improve them if they are weak; do not rewrite them for novelty.
- Heading structure. One H1 per page, headings in a sensible order.
- Image alt text, which frequently gets lost entirely in a rebuild.
- Schema markup — organisation, breadcrumbs, FAQ, product or service, whatever the old site had, plus anything it should have had.
- XML sitemap and robots.txt, rebuilt and resubmitted, not copied across with the old URLs still in them.
- Canonical tags, pointing at the new canonical URLs.
- Analytics and conversion tracking, verified as firing before launch rather than discovered missing a month later.
Launch day and the fortnight after
When the damage, if any, will show.
- Crawl the new site immediately and fix every 404 and every redirect chain the crawl finds.
- Resubmit the sitemap in Search Console and request indexing on the most important pages.
- Check Search Console coverage daily for two weeks. A spike in “not found” or “redirect error” is the early warning.
- Watch impressions, not rankings. Impressions move first and are less noisy than position tracking.
- Expect a small dip. Two to four weeks of mild turbulence is normal while Google recrawls. A 50% drop that does not recover is not turbulence, it is a broken redirect map.
- Confirm forms actually send. Test every one, from a phone, on cellular. This is the most common and most expensive post-launch failure.
FAQ
Related questions.
Will a redesign hurt my SEO?
It will if the URLs change without redirects, or if the pages that were ranking get rewritten for the sake of it. Done properly — full URL inventory, one-to-one 301s, titles and headings preserved on earning pages — a redesign usually improves rankings, because the site gets faster and clearer.
How do I know which pages are earning?
Google Search Console, free, under Performance. Sort by clicks and impressions over the last twelve months. Anything with meaningful traffic or external links is protected, whatever you think of how it looks.
Should I change my URLs?
Only when there is a real reason, and then map every old one to its closest new equivalent with a 301. Never blanket-redirect a set of pages to the homepage — Google treats that as a soft 404 and the equity does not transfer.
How long should a redesign take?
One to two weeks of production for a standard business site. The URL inventory and redirect map should happen before the design starts, not after launch.
Or hand the list to someone who already uses it.
Redirect mapping and content migration are part of every Markora redesign, not an extra line item. Fixed price $299, live in seven days.
Get a fixed price → See the price list