What to do before, during and after a redesign
Traffic lost in a redesign is usually lost in a single afternoon, through decisions nobody thought were search decisions.
Record what currently earns traffic, keep every old address working, and check the new site is actually indexable on the day it launches. Most redesign losses come from three things: broken addresses, a staging setting left switched on, and content removed because it looked dated.
Before: write down what you are risking
A redesign without a baseline cannot be judged, because a decline three weeks later will be attributed to seasonality by whoever prefers that explanation. Export the pages that earn visits, the queries they earn them on, and the addresses of everything currently published.
That export is also the argument you will need when somebody proposes deleting a page that looks old but brings in a quarter of your enquiries.
- Every published address, taken from the sitemap and from a crawl
- The pages that earn visits and the queries they earn them on
- Current titles and descriptions for those pages
- The pages other sites link to, which are the ones you cannot lose
During: addresses are the whole game
Every old address must either survive unchanged or send visitors to the closest equivalent page. Sending everything to the home page counts as breaking it: the visitor did not want your home page, and the search engine treats the whole set as removed content.
The other common loss is content. A page with three hundred words that earns steady traffic is not thin, it is answering a question. Redesigns delete these because they do not fit a new template, and the template is not the thing generating enquiries.
Launch day: check the switch
Staging sites are blocked from indexing on purpose, and that block is copied to production more often than anybody would like to admit. It costs nothing to check and it is the single most expensive thing that can go unnoticed for a week.
Check the file that controls crawling, check the page-level directives, and request one page from the live site as a search engine would see it rather than trusting the browser.
- Crawling is allowed on the live domain
- No page-level directive blocking indexing survived from staging
- The sitemap is present, current and submitted
- Canonical addresses point at the live site, not at staging
- Old addresses resolve to the right new page, not to the home page
After: watch for four weeks, not four days
Some movement is normal while pages are recrawled and the new structure is understood. What is not normal is a page disappearing entirely, or a redirect chain that keeps growing as people fix one problem with another.
Compare against the baseline weekly for a month. If something has genuinely dropped, the export tells you exactly which address to look at, which turns a vague argument into a specific fix.
What to take from this
- 01Export the baseline before anything is touched
- 02Every old address goes to its closest equivalent, never to the home page
- 03A staging directive reaching production is the most expensive silent failure
- 04Judge it over four weeks against the export, not by feeling
Ask the question directly
- How long do we keep the redirects?
- Permanently, in practice. They are cheap to keep and other people's links to your old addresses do not expire.
- Can we change the address structure at the same time?
- You can, but it adds risk to a change that already has plenty. If both are needed, launch the design first and restructure once the new site is stable.
- Should we launch during a quiet period?
- Yes, and give yourself a working week afterwards when the people who built it are still available. Launching before a holiday is how a small problem gets ten days to grow.
Related answers
SEO management
One monthly programme: technical fixes, content architecture and internal links, aimed at the queries that end in a sale rather than the ones that end in a visit.
Web development
New builds, rescues and re-platforms, measured against what the site earns rather than against how it looks. The brand system that carries it is built in the same engagement.
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