Website Redesign: When to Do It and How to Protect Your SEO

A redesign can improve how your business looks, how fast the site loads and how many visitors become customers. It can also damage your search visibility if URLs, content and links change carelessly. Planning prevents most of the risk.

Signs it may be time to redesign

• The site looks dated or is awkward on a phone
• Pages load slowly or the site is hard to update
• Your services or brand have changed
• The site no longer produces enquiries

Before you start: record what you have

Make a list of your current pages, their addresses, titles and descriptions. Note which pages bring traffic and enquiries using Google Search Console and Analytics. These are the pages to protect.

Keep what works

If a page ranks and converts, keep its content and address where possible. Changing everything at once makes it hard to know what caused any drop.

Map old addresses to new ones

If an address has to change, set up a 301 redirect from the old address to the closest new page. Avoid sending everything to the home page, because that loses relevance.

Carry over the important elements

• Page titles and meta descriptions
• Headings and internal links
• Image alt text
• Structured data

Build on a staging site

Work on a private copy and keep it hidden from search engines. Remember to remove the block when you launch. Forgetting this is a common and costly mistake.

Test before and after launch

Check redirects, forms, mobile layout, page speed and analytics tracking. After launch, submit the sitemap in Search Console and watch for errors over the next weeks.

Be realistic

Some movement in rankings after a redesign is normal, and no one can guarantee results. Good planning makes it smaller and shorter.

See our website migration and redesign service or the migration checklist.