How to redesign a website without losing SEO

Google does not rank your business. It ranks individual pages, and it identifies each page by its address. The page at yoursite.co.za/services/roofing has a history of its own: links from other websites, years of visits, and a position for a search like “roofing contractor Durban” that took a long time to earn. That history is attached to the address, not to the words on the page.

A redesign almost always changes addresses. The new site has tidier URLs, a different structure, or one page where there used to be two. Any old address that stops working loses its history, and that happens as soon as Google next visits and finds a “page not found” error. Which means the first job of a redesign is to find every old address and decide what happens to it.

We collect the old addresses from four places, because none of them is complete on its own: the old site’s sitemap, the pages listed in Google Search Console, a crawl of the site that we run ourselves, and the pages that actually received visitors in the last year according to analytics. Together these make the address list, and it is always longer than the client expects. A fifteen-page brochure site can turn out to have ninety addresses once the tag pages, old PDFs and image pages are counted.

Then we go through the list and decide one of three things for each address: keep it at the same address on the new site, move it to a new address, or retire it. That list of decisions is the redirect map, and we do not launch until every line has one.

Sometimes the audit shows that nothing needs to move. When we rebuilt a packaging supplier’s catalogue, the old WooCommerce site had 202 product addresses and 22 category addresses, all of them worth keeping. So we built the new site to answer at exactly the same addresses, /products/the-slug and /category/the-slug, all 224 of them. There were no redirects at all, Google had nothing to re-evaluate, and the rankings carried on as if nothing had changed. That is the best outcome you can get, and you only get it by auditing the old site before you design the new one.

A redirect tells Google that a page has moved. A permanent redirect, called a 301, says the move is final, so Google transfers the old page’s history to the new address and drops the old one. A temporary redirect, a 302, says the page will be back, so Google keeps the old address in its index and waits. Google has said for years that both kinds pass ranking signals, but a temporary redirect left on a permanent move leaves the old address competing with the new one for months. Some hosting control panels create temporary redirects by default, so it is worth checking which kind you have.

Two more rules. A redirect should point at the closest equivalent page, not at the homepage, because Google treats a pile of redirects to the homepage as if the pages had been deleted. And it should point at the final address rather than at another redirect, because each extra hop loses a little and long chains sometimes stop being followed.

Not every old page deserves to survive, and a redesign is a good time to retire the news post from 2016 that nobody reads. The point is that it should be a decision rather than an accident. We sort the old pages by the traffic and links they have, keep the ones that earn their place, merge near-duplicates into one stronger page, and redirect the retired ones to the closest page that still exists.

One mistake is common enough to describe. If the old site ranks for a category page such as /category/paper-bags, the new site needs a real page at that address, with that category’s description and products on it. Redirecting it to a filtered view of a general products page, like /products?category=paper, moves the ranking to one generic page that cannot hold it. This is the usual way an online store loses its category rankings during a rebuild.

• The same subject, in the same words the old page ranked for. If a page about roofing becomes a page about “exterior solutions”, Google sees a different subject and the ranking does not follow.
• A title and description that say what the page is in the words a customer would use, rather than in the brand’s language.
• Its images, with their file names and alt text, where those had search value of their own.
• Its internal links. If twenty pages on the old site linked to it, the new site should link to it too.

The week before launch we save the positions, impressions and clicks for the top fifty pages from Search Console, so there is a baseline to compare against afterwards. On launch day we then:

• Test every line of the redirect map with a crawler rather than by hand.
• Submit the new sitemap in Search Console and remove the old one.
• Confirm the “do not index” setting from the staging site has been removed. Launching with that setting still on is the most common self-inflicted problem we see.
• Confirm Google Analytics and Search Console are receiving data from the new site.
• Open a few of the old addresses on a phone, from outside the office network, because that is how customers arrive.

For the next four weeks we watch two reports in Search Console: the Pages report, for a rise in “not found” errors, and the Performance report, for any page whose impressions drop. A well-run migration dips for a week or two and then returns to where it was or better. A badly run one falls and stays down. The difference is almost never the design. It is whether the redirect map was done.

How long do the redirects need to stay?

Google suggests at least a year. We leave them permanently, because other websites, bookmarks and printed material keep pointing at the old addresses long after Google has updated, and a redirect costs nothing to keep.

Does changing the domain name lose rankings?

It is the same process with one extra step, the Change of Address tool in Search Console, which tells Google the whole site has moved. We did this for our own site in September 2026 when it moved from .co.za to .com. Expect a few weeks for the new domain to settle, and keep the old domain redirecting permanently.

Can we redesign in stages?

Yes, and for a large site it is often the safer route. Rebuild one section at a time at its existing addresses, check the reports, then move to the next section. Each step has a smaller map and a problem is easier to trace.

Sometimes the old site ranks for something it should not, such as a product you no longer sell. Keeping that ranking with a redirect keeps a number on a chart and sends visitors to the wrong place. We would rather tell you a ranking is not 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, have the address list and the redirect map written before the first design is drawn. It takes about a day and it protects years of work. It is the first thing we do on every website redesign.