Why rankings drop after a redesign
Search engines rank individual pages, not your business as a whole. When a redesign changes those pages, the rankings attached to them can be lost. The usual causes are:
- Page addresses change and the old ones lead nowhere.
- Content is cut in the name of a cleaner design, taking the words that ranked with it.
- Titles, headings and descriptions are rewritten without keeping the search terms they were ranking for.
- The new site is slower or harder to use on phones.
- The test site was hidden from search and the setting was never turned off at launch.
Every one of these can be prevented.
Before you start: record what you have
- List every page. Use your current sitemap, or a crawler such as Screaming Frog, to export every address on the site.
- Find your best pages. In Google Search Console, note which pages get the most clicks and which searches bring them in. These are the pages to protect most carefully.
- Save the current titles, descriptions and headings for those pages.
- Note your backlinks. Pages that other sites link to carry extra weight, so their addresses matter even more.
Keep your addresses, or redirect them
The safest redesign keeps every page at the same address. When an address has to change, set up a 301 redirect from the old address to the closest new page. A 301 tells search engines the page has moved for good and passes its ranking on.
- Redirect each old page to its true equivalent, not everything to the home page.
- Avoid chains, where one redirect leads to another.
- Keep the redirects in place for good, not just a few months.
Build the redirect map as a simple spreadsheet: old address in one column, new address in the other, and check every row before launch.
Keep the content that ranks
A redesign is a chance to improve content, not to remove it. For each of your best pages, keep the main topic, the key search terms, and the useful detail that earned the ranking. If you merge pages, make sure the merged page covers everything the old ones did, and redirect both old addresses to it.
Build and test on a copy
Never redesign on the live site. Build on a copy, and keep that copy out of search results with a password or a “noindex” setting, so search engines do not find two versions of your site.
Before launch, test:
- every redirect in your map
- every page on a phone as well as a desktop
- forms, checkouts and bookings, end to end
- page speed, using PageSpeed Insights
- that titles, descriptions and headings are in place on every page
Launch day
- Remove the “noindex” setting and password from the new site. This is the most common and most damaging mistake.
- Turn on the redirects.
- Submit the new sitemap in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
- Check a sample of old addresses in a browser to confirm they land on the right new pages.
The weeks after launch
Some movement in rankings is normal for a few weeks while search engines recrawl the site. Watch for anything that does not settle:
- Not found errors in Search Console’s Pages report point to missing redirects. Add them.
- Pages that lost traffic should be compared with the old version. Something important may have been cut.
- New pages not yet indexed can be requested through Search Console’s URL Inspection tool.
Moving to a new platform
The same checklist applies when you move platforms, for example from WordPress to Shopify. Shopify and WordPress structure addresses differently, so a full redirect map is essential. Both make it straightforward to add redirects in bulk.
We follow this checklist on every redesign and platform move, including keeping and redirecting your existing pages. If your site needs a rebuild and you are worried about traffic, tell us about it.