A website redesign is similar to a website launch (of a new website) but combined with a site move. A new website being redesigned may or may not include new URLs. Pages and filenames may or may not change, but the content can be moved, removed, or added to the new website. Because of this, it’s imperative that Bill Hartzer is involved throughout this process to ensure that no traffic is lost during or after the website redesign.
SEO Deliverables
Typically, during a website redesign, there are several SEO deliverables:
- Website crawl of the current website to make a list of content, meta data, and redirects.
- Review of plan to add, remove, or change current web pages.
- Audit of the new website before the new website redesign goes live.
- Make a List of changes to implement before the website goes live.
- Ensure proper redirects are in place.
- Review and crawl of website after the new website goes live.
Why Redesigns Lose Rankings
I have been called in after enough failed redesigns to know the pattern. The new site looks better, loads faster and was built by a competent agency, and within six weeks organic traffic is down forty percent. The cause is almost never the design. It is the dozens of small decisions made during the build that nobody reviewed for search impact: URLs that changed without redirects, pages that were consolidated and lost their content, title tags reset to the page name by the new theme, images renamed, internal links pointed at old addresses, a staging site that was indexed, or a robots.txt file copied from development that still blocks crawling. Each one is a five-minute fix if it is caught before launch and a months-long recovery if it is found after.
Google does not rank a website. It ranks pages, and every page on your current site has a history: links pointing to it, queries it ranks for, and a record in Google’s index. A redesign that does not preserve that history on a page-by-page basis is starting over. The redirect map is the document that preserves it, and it has to be complete, one-to-one wherever possible, and tested before the switch is flipped.
What the Pre-Launch Audit Covers
Before a redesigned site goes live I crawl the development version with Screaming Frog and compare it against the crawl of the current site. The comparison answers the questions that matter: which URLs changed, which pages disappeared, which pages lost word count, whether title tags, meta descriptions, headings and canonical tags carried over, whether structured data is still present and valid, whether the XML sitemap reflects the new structure, whether internal links resolve without redirects, and whether page speed and Core Web Vitals held up under the new theme and plugins. For WordPress sites that usually means checking what the new theme does to heading tags and what the new page builder does to load time.
The output is a punch list for the developers, ordered by what would cost the most traffic if it shipped. Most of the items are quick. The point of the audit is that they get fixed before Google sees them.
After Launch
Launch day is when monitoring starts, not when the work ends. I recrawl the live site, submit the new sitemap, check that redirects return a single 301 rather than a chain, watch Google Search Console for coverage errors and crawl anomalies, and compare rankings and traffic against the pre-launch baseline week by week. A small dip in the first two weeks is normal while Google reprocesses the site. A dip that continues into the second month is a problem with a specific cause, and the crawl data usually points to it.
Common Redesign Mistakes
The mistakes I see most often are redirecting every old URL to the home page instead of to its equivalent page, which Google treats as a soft 404; dropping blog content because it looked dated, when those posts were earning the links and rankings; launching on a Friday with no one available to fix problems over the weekend; and leaving the old site live on a staging subdomain where Google indexes it as a duplicate. The last one is the most common and the easiest to prevent.
Ongoing Monthly SEO Services
While Hartzer Consulting specializes in technical SEO audits of websites, we also provide SEO consulting services, on a retainer basis. We always prefer to begin all new projects with an SEO audit to find out the issues that need to be addressed. Contact us today to find out more about our monthly SEO services and how we can help you reach the goals for your website.
When a redesign or domain change is followed by a traffic collapse, the questions of redirect mapping, indexation and standard of care are addressed on the website migration SEO failure expert witness page.
A new site should be crawlable, indexable and measured from the day it goes live; that work is described under website launch SEO services.