Guide · Websites
How do you redesign or migrate a website without losing search visibility?
A website redesign or migration keeps its search visibility when every existing address is redirected permanently to its new equivalent, the content and titles that already perform are carried over, and search engines can crawl the new site from the first day. Most losses after a relaunch come from missing redirects, dropped pages or a crawl block left over from the test site. All three can be prevented with an inventory made before the build starts.
Why do sites lose visibility after a redesign?
A search engine knows your site by its addresses. Each address has a history: its content, the queries it is shown for, the links that point to it. Change the address without a redirect and that history is lost, while visitors land on an error page. The usual causes:
- Addresses changed with no redirect, or everything redirected to the home page.
- Pages that brought visitors were merged or deleted because they did not fit the new menu.
- Titles, headings and text were rewritten without a look at the queries they served.
- The noindex setting or crawl block of the test site went live with it.
- Text that used to be in the page is now loaded by JavaScript only.
What do you do before the build starts?
- List every existing address: from a crawl of the site, the sitemap, the pages with visits in Search Console and your statistics, and the pages other sites link to.
- Record for each its title, description, main heading and the queries it is found for.
- Decide per page: keep, improve, merge or remove. Decide on the figures, not on taste.
- Draw up the redirect map: each old address to its closest new equivalent, one to one.
- If the site has never been examined, have an SEO audit done first, so that old faults are not rebuilt.
What must be right on launch day?
- Permanent redirects (status 301) in place and tested against the whole list, not a sample.
- The crawl block and noindex setting removed from the live site.
- Internal links pointing straight to the new addresses, not through a redirect.
- Canonical tags, structured data and language tags present.
- The new sitemap submitted in Search Console.
- Statistics and conversion measurement working, with consent handled.
What do you watch afterwards?
- Search Console in the first weeks: crawl errors, pages indexed, pages excluded.
- Requests that end in an error page, to find addresses the list missed and redirect them.
- Visits and positions for your main queries against the figures from before.
Leave the redirects in place for the long term; removing them after a few months undoes the work. Some movement in the first weeks is normal while search engines process the change. A steady decline is not, and needs investigating at once.
What is different in a WordPress migration?
It depends on what moves.
- Another host, same addresses. The search risk is small; watch for downtime, speed and lost settings.
- Another domain. Every address changes. Redirect all of them and report the move with the change of address tool in Search Console.
- Another system or address structure. This needs the full redirect map above.
In WordPress, search titles, descriptions and redirects are often kept by a plugin. Export them before the move, or they stay behind.
We treat the migration as part of every website we build.
Frequently asked questions
Will we lose positions whatever we do?
Some movement in the first weeks is normal, because search engines have to process the new addresses. With complete redirects and the content carried over, visibility normally settles again. Nobody can promise this, since the search engine decides, but the avoidable causes can all be removed.
How long do the redirects have to stay?
For as long as you can keep them, and in practice permanently. Other sites and old bookmarks keep pointing to the old addresses for years, and each redirect removed turns those visits into error pages.
Should we change the domain name at the same time as the design?
Preferably not. Every change made at once adds risk, and if visibility drops it becomes hard to tell which change caused it. If both are needed, plan them as separate steps with time in between to measure.
Can a migration be undone if the results drop?
Keep a complete back-up of the old site and its database, so that going back is possible. In practice a drop is usually traced to a specific fault, such as missing redirects or a crawl block, and repairing that is faster and safer than reverting.
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