How to redesign a website without losing Google rankings

Google doesn’t rank your business. It ranks pages, by address. The page at yoursite.co.za/services/roofing has a history: links from other sites, years of visits, a position for “roofing contractor” that took a long time to earn. That history is tied to the address, not to the words on the page.

A redesign nearly always changes addresses. The new site has cleaner URLs, a different structure, a page that merged two old ones. Every old address that stops answering takes its history with it. Not gradually. It goes when Google next visits and finds a 404.

Before we design anything, we pull the list of every address the old site has: from its sitemap, from Search Console, from the crawl we run ourselves, and from the pages that actually receive visits. Then we decide, one line at a time, where each old address goes on the new site. That list is the redirect map, and the launch does not happen until every line has a destination.

Each redirect is permanent, a 301, which is the signal that tells Google the page has moved rather than vanished. The history follows it. Temporary redirects, the 302 kind that a lot of hosting panels default to, don’t pass it on. We have seen a site lose half its traffic to that one setting.

Not every page deserves to survive. A redesign is the right moment to retire the 2016 news post nobody reads. But the decision has to be deliberate. We rank the old pages by the traffic and links they carry, keep the ones that earn their place, merge the near-duplicates into one stronger page, and redirect the retired ones to the closest living relative rather than to the homepage, which Google treats as a soft 404.

• The same subject, in the same words the old page ranked for. A page about roofing that becomes a page about “exterior solutions” has changed subject, and the ranking won’t follow.
• A title and description that still say what the page is, in the buyer’s language, not the brand’s.
• Its images, with their file names and alt text, where they had any search value of their own.
• Its internal links. If the old site pointed at the page from twenty places, the new one should too.

We record the positions and traffic for the top pages the week before cutover. On launch day, the redirect map is tested line by line, the new sitemap goes to Search Console, and the old one is retired. For the next four weeks we watch the coverage report for the two things that signal a broken migration: a rise in “not found” pages, and a fall in impressions for a page that used to have them.

A well-run migration shows a wobble of a week or two and then settles at or above where it was. A badly run one shows a cliff. The difference is almost never design. It is the map.

Sometimes the old site ranks for something it shouldn’t, a page that gets traffic for a product you no longer sell. Redirecting it keeps a number on a chart and sends people to the wrong place. We would rather tell you that a ranking isn’t worth keeping than protect it for the sake of the graph.

If you are planning a redesign and your current site ranks for anything you care about, get the address list and the redirect map written before the first design is drawn. It is a day’s work that protects years of it.