Website Redesign SEO Checklist: Keep Your Rankings When You Rebuild

A new website should bring in more business. Too often it does the opposite: the old site ranked for years, the shiny new one launches, and enquiries quietly fall off a cliff.

The good news is that this is almost always avoidable. Here’s the checklist we use, adapted for small business sites.

Before you design anything

1. Export what’s working now

From Google Search Console, export the Pages and Queries reports for the last 12–16 months. These tell you which pages earn impressions and clicks today. Those are the pages you must protect.

Also note which pages other websites link to (Search Console → Links → Top linked pages). Links pointing at URLs that disappear are value you throw away.

2. Crawl the current site

Get a full list of every URL on the old site: pages, blog posts, PDFs, image URLs that get traffic. A crawler tool or your sitemap will give you this. You’ll need it for the redirect map.

3. Benchmark speed and conversions

Record current page speed (PageSpeed Insights), monthly form fills and calls. You want to prove the new site is better, not hope it is.

While you plan the new structure

4. Build a URL map

A simple spreadsheet: old URL → new URL → status. Every old URL gets one of three outcomes:

• Keep: same URL on the new site (simplest, safest).
• Redirect (301): the content moves to a new URL, or merges into a better page on the same topic.
• Retire: the page has no traffic, no links and no future. It can return a 404 or 410. Don’t redirect unrelated pages to the home page; Google tends to treat that like a 404 anyway.

5. Don’t change URLs you don’t have to

Prettier URLs aren’t worth losing rankings over. If an old URL is fine, keep it.

6. Carry content across deliberately

Pages that rank often do so because of specific text, headings and answers. If design trims a 900-word service page to 120 words of slogans, expect rankings to follow. Improve content; don’t delete what’s working.

Before launch: on a staging site

7. Check the essentials on every key page

• Unique title and meta description
• One clear H1
• Canonical tag pointing to itself
• No noindex tag (staging sites often carry one, and it must not reach production)
• Structured data matches what’s on the page
• Images have alt text and sensible file sizes

8. Test speed and Core Web Vitals

Google’s Core Web Vitals targets are LCP within 2.5 seconds, INP of 200 milliseconds or less, and CLS of 0.1 or less, measured at the 75th percentile of real visits. You can’t measure real visits on staging, but lab tests (Lighthouse) will catch heavy images, render-blocking fonts and layout shifts before they go live.

9. Test every form and phone link

On a phone. On a real network. Send yourself a test enquiry from every form.

10. Test the redirects

Load the redirect list against the staging server, or test immediately after launch. Every old URL should land on its new page in one hop with a 301 status. Google’s site move guidance recommends server-side permanent redirects, avoiding chains, and keeping redirects for at least a year.

Launch day

11. Go live, then remove barriers

Check robots.txt and noindex tags on the live site right away. It’s the single most common launch-day mistake.

12. Submit the new sitemap

In Search Console, submit the new XML sitemap. Google suggests submitting both old and new sitemaps for a while during a move so you can watch indexing shift across.

13. Request indexing for key pages

Use URL Inspection on your home page and top service pages.

The first month after launch

• Days 1–14: check Search Console daily for spikes in 404s, server errors and “Excluded by noindex.” Fix fast.
• Weeks 2–6: watch impressions and clicks for the pages you protected. Some fluctuation is normal while Google re-crawls. Google says new URLs can take a few weeks or more to replace old ones on medium-sized sites.
• Month 2: compare leads and speed with your benchmarks.

Red flags to stop and fix

• Traffic to a whole section drops to zero → redirects missing or noindex left on
• Old URLs return 200 with a “page not found” message → soft 404s; redirect or return a real 404
• Redirect chains (A → B → C) → point A straight at C
• Analytics shows nothing → tracking code didn’t make it to the new templates

Want it done for you?

Migration planning is built into our SEO web design service: URL mapping, tested redirects, and launch monitoring. If you’re mid-redesign and worried, an SEO audit can review your plan before you go live.