Does a website redesign affect SEO?

A website redesign can move rankings, and some temporary fluctuation is normal while Google recrawls the site. When old pages vanish or change, search engines must find and index your new structure. For a medium-sized website, it can take a few weeks or more for Google to start showing the new URLs instead of the old ones. Larger sites may take much longer.

Google advises changing one thing at a time. If you plan to move your domain, change your CMS, or update your layout, you should do these tasks one after the other rather than all at once.

On sites Big Rocket has rebuilt, traffic has generally stayed the same or grown after launch. For example, when we rebuilt the Jetify site, traffic rose by about 35% immediately after launch.

Before you start: benchmark and list every URL

Record where you rank now and list every URL before anything changes. Google suggests starting your URL list with these four sources:

  • Sitemaps
  • The pages with the most traffic in your server logs or analytics
  • Pages with internal and external links in Search Console's Links report
  • Your CMS's list of URLs

You must also include images, videos and files such as PDFs in your list. It is vital to move and redirect these assets too.

Record a baseline of your current rankings and top pages. If your traffic is seasonal or dips on certain weekdays, plan the launch for a quieter period.

Keep your staging site out of Google by using noindex tags or crawling blocks during development. Prepare to remove those rules at launch. Each new URL should carry a self-referencing canonical tag.

Map every old URL to a new one

A URL map is a list pairing each old address with its new one, and it is the single most important document in a redesign. During our rebuild of bigrocket.co.uk, we used a redirect map containing 26 old URLs to manage the transition for site migrations. The breakdown of those 26 rows is as follows:

  • Old service and location pages: 11, each to the matching new service page
  • Old portfolio pages: 6, to the new case studies or Work page
  • Retired offer and old contact pages: 6, to the contact page
  • Form success pages: 2, to the new thank-you page
  • Blog index: 1, to /insights

Another 10 old test and draft pages get no redirect and return a 404. Pages that keep their original URL, such as /about or /contact, need no redirect. Google advises that content you are not moving should return a 404 or 410 error. You should avoid redirecting many old URLs to one irrelevant page like the home page, as this can be treated as a soft 404. If you merge several old pages into one new page, those URLs can redirect to the single new destination.

Use permanent redirects, not chains

Send each old URL straight to its new page with a 301 or 308 redirect. Google states permanent redirects do not cause a loss in PageRank. You should use these types of server-side redirects when you are sure the move will not be reverted. Both 301 and 308 status codes mean the page has moved permanently.

Redirect chains occur when one URL points to another, which then points to a third. Googlebot can follow up to 10 redirect hops. However, you should aim to redirect straight to the final URL to avoid these chains entirely. If a chain is unavoidable, keep it to no more than 3 hops.

Keep your redirects active for at least one year. You should generally keep them for as long as possible to maintain the connection between the old and new addresses.

Keep the content, metadata and structured data that rank

You should keep the titles, descriptions, content and schema of pages that already rank, and update internal links to the new URLs. Google advises updating your own internal links to the new URLs straight after the move. You should also ask sites that link to your old pages to update their links. On the LuxuryTrainTickets.com site, we built search in from the start:

  • Structured data on every pricing and journey page pulled from the CMS.
  • FAQ markup on every train overview page.
  • Author pages for the guides.
  • An llms.txt file for AI assistants.
  • POA for sold-out journeys, so search results do not show a wrong price.

On the Webflow sites Big Rocket builds, the marketing team sets titles, descriptions, social images and redirects page by page without a developer. Webflow's paid site plans include custom title tags and meta descriptions for every page, canonical tags, an auto-generated XML sitemap, schema markup support and 301 redirects.

Launch day and the first 30 days

Test every redirect on launch day, submit the new sitemap and watch Search Console daily for a month.

Before switch-over:

  • Perform a complete crawl and URL inventory.
  • Record current rankings and top pages as a baseline.
  • Map content to CMS collections.
  • Get the redirect map signed off.
  • List forms, analytics and tags.
  • Test the staging site on real devices.

After launch:

  • Verify every 301 redirect is live and tested.
  • Submit the sitemap to Search Console.
  • Check crawl errors daily.
  • Compare new rankings with the baseline.
  • Keep old hosting until all checks are finished.
  • Train staff on the Webflow Editor.

Google recommends monitoring traffic on both old and new URLs in Search Console and analytics during the move. Submitting a sitemap helps speed up discovery of your new structure. Before any site goes live, we perform a pre-launch SEO sweep to find issues. We fix anything found broken during this stage. Our builds are usually faster and more SEO friendly than the sites they replace.

We move sites in five stages. First is an audit to crawl the site and record rankings. Second is the rebuild on a staging site. Third is migration where we import content, rewrite internal links and approve the redirect map. Fourth is the switch-over when the domain is pointed, redirects are tested and the sitemap is submitted. The final stage is 30 days of monitoring which ends with a post-launch report.

Changing platform as well as design

The same steps apply when you change platform, but you should treat it as a separate task where possible. Google advises changing one thing at a time to manage technical changes effectively. We move WordPress sites to Webflow sites with content and URLs mapped so existing rankings can carry over.

Most traffic lost during a migration comes from broken URLs and missing metadata. Because of this, we check for both before, during, and after the move through several specific actions:

  • Setting a 301 redirect for every changed URL.
  • Carrying over titles, descriptions, and schema.
  • Rewriting internal links to the new structure.
  • Monitoring Search Console daily for 30 days after launch.

If you need help with a move, talk to us.

Sources

Researched and fact-checked with the help of AI tools and Ahrefs data.