How to redesign a website without losing your rankings
Traffic collapses after a redesign for a small number of predictable reasons. All of them are avoidable with a fortnight of planning.
The horror story is common enough to have become a cliche: a business redesigns its website, launches, and watches organic traffic fall off a cliff. It happens for a handful of reasons, and every one of them is preventable.
Crawl the old site before you touch anything
Export every URL, its title, its meta description and its organic traffic. This is your reference. Without it you cannot tell what you lost, only that you lost something.
Map every URL, including the ones you are deleting
Every old URL needs a destination. If the page is going, redirect it to the closest equivalent, not to the homepage. Bulk redirects to the homepage are treated as soft 404s and pass almost nothing.
Do not lose the content that was ranking
Redesigns often shorten pages for visual reasons. If a page ranks because it answers something thoroughly, cutting that content removes the reason it ranks. Design around the content that earns traffic.
Check the staging site is not indexable
Then check the live site is. The most expensive redesign mistake is shipping a robots.txt disallow from staging to production, and it is far more common than anyone admits.
Watch for a month
Submit the new sitemap, monitor Search Console daily for two weeks, and expect some volatility while Google recrawls. A dip of ten to fifteen percent for a fortnight is normal. A fifty percent drop that does not recover is a redirect problem, and it is fixable if you catch it early.
Frequently asked
With redirects done properly, two to four weeks of mild volatility and then recovery. If traffic is still down after six weeks, something is broken rather than settling.
Where they are sensible, yes. Changing URLs for the sake of tidiness costs ranking equity and buys very little. Only change them when the structure is genuinely wrong.
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