A website redesign puts at stake an asset nobody sees on the mock-up: the positions earned in search engines, page by page, over the years. Poorly prepared, the launch can wipe them out in one evening — the old addresses stop responding, the links pointing to them lead nowhere, and the pages that attracted visitors drop out of the results. Well prepared, it loses almost nothing. The steps for keeping your SEO are well known; their only flaw is that they have to be done before anyone sees the point.
What follows is for a business that has already decided on its redesign, or started it. The question is no longer whether to redo the site, but how to do it without losing what it already brings in.
Why a redesign makes traffic drop
Search engines do not rank a site; they rank pages, identified by their address. Over time each page builds up inbound links, a click history, recognised relevance for certain queries. A redesign that changes addresses without telling the engines presents them with new pages with no history, while the old ones return an error.
Links from other sites are the most valuable part of that asset, and the hardest to rebuild. A press article, a trade directory, a partner linking to a specific page: none will be corrected by its author after the redesign. If the address they point to returns an error, the value they passed on is lost. Only a redirect keeps it.
Three other causes often add to the first:
- content deleted because it looked secondary, when it was attracting a large share of visitors;
- content rewritten without regard for the terms visitors used to find it;
- technical errors introduced at switchover: pages blocked from search engines, forgotten tags, the staging version left accessible — or, conversely, the live version left set to no-index.
None of these causes is inevitable. Google itself states, in its documentation on site moves, that visibility may fluctuate temporarily during a migration and that this is normal. What is not normal is a drop that lasts: it almost always signals a skipped step.
The steps of a website redesign, from inventory to launch
Four steps, in this order. The first two happen before design, which is why they are so often neglected: at that stage nobody yet feels they are doing search optimisation.
Inventory of pages and positions
List every address on the current site, then, for each, what it brings in: visits from search engines, queries it appears for, external links pointing to it. The data comes from analytics tools, Google Search Console and a site-crawling tool.
This inventory changes the conversation about site structure. A page the team thought secondary may turn out to be the site’s main entry point. It must then survive the redesign, with its content, even if its place in the menu changes.
A simple precaution completes the inventory: keep a copy of the old site — its pages, titles and descriptions — as it stood before the switchover. If an important page loses its rankings after launch, that copy is how you understand what changed. Without it, all you can do is guess.
The 301 redirect plan
Every old address must map to a new one: the same page if it still exists, the closest page if it has been merged, and only as a last resort a general page. Google recommends permanent server-side redirects, such as 301 or 308, and keeping them for as long as possible — generally at least a year.
The plan is kept in a two-column table, old address and new address, approved before launch. Two mistakes are common: redirecting every old page to the home page, which amounts to losing them, and creating chains of redirects that slow down search engines and visitors alike.
SEO testing before switchover
Before launch, the new site is crawled the way a search engine would. The checks: redirects respond as planned, important pages exist with their titles and descriptions, internal links point to the new addresses rather than the old ones, and the sitemap is up to date.
Checks also cover what must not be indexed. The staging version must stay invisible to search engines; the live version, for its part, must not inherit by mistake the no-index setting applied during development. It is the simplest error, and one of the costliest.
Finally, testing covers what the visitor experiences: loading time, display on a phone, accessibility of forms. These criteria weigh not only on experience; they are also part of what search engines observe about a page. A better-looking but slower site can lose what the redesign was supposed to gain.
Monitoring over the following 90 days
Launch is not the end of the project. In the following weeks, monitor the crawl errors reported by Search Console, the trend in indexed pages, traffic to the key pages identified in the inventory, and positions on the main queries. Google notes that for a medium-sized site it can take a few weeks or more for the new addresses to replace the old ones in its results: monitoring must therefore go on well past the first days.
An error spotted in the first week is fixed in an hour. The same error found three months later has had time to cost that quarter.
Launch checklist
- inventory of old addresses drawn up, with the traffic and links for each;
- redirect plan approved, with no blanket redirect to the home page and no chains;
- content of key pages kept, or rewritten while keeping the searched-for terms;
- titles and descriptions present on every important page;
- internal links updated to the new addresses;
- sitemap up to date and submitted in Search Console;
- no-index removed in production, kept on staging;
- analytics in place from the first hour;
- redirects tested one by one after switchover;
- monitoring scheduled over the following weeks, with a named owner.
This list belongs in the site’s specification, before a supplier is chosen: search optimisation then stops being an option discovered at quote stage. It does not, however, replace the underlying question — why redo the site, and to what end. Preserving the traffic of a site that does not convince only preserves a site that does not convince.
Search itself is changing, and what a site must prepare no longer stops at conventional engines: GEO is not SEO with extras, and being cited by an AI is prepared in the page. At Maeliom Build, these steps are part of the redesign project, not a separate service.
Common questions
Does a redesign always cost search rankings?
No. A temporary dip while search engines process the new addresses is normal. A lasting drop almost always signals missing redirects, deleted content or an indexing error.
How long should 301 redirects be kept?
For as long as possible. Google generally recommends at least a year; keeping them longer costs almost nothing and protects old links that still point to the site.
Can the domain name be changed at the same time as the redesign?
It is possible, but it combines two changes and two sources of fluctuation. If both are needed, the redirect plan and the monitoring must be all the more rigorous; Search Console offers a dedicated change-of-address tool for domain moves.
Source: Google Search Central, “Site moves with URL changes”, updated 20 August 2026.