A company has a website that looks like 2014, but people arrive on it from Google. For ten years it has been linked to by directories, suppliers, trade press and customers. The new site is ready: better looking, faster. It goes live on Friday. On Monday the first phone call comes in: „we cannot find you any more“.
This does not happen because Google dislikes new websites. It happens because the old addresses vanished and nobody said where they moved to. Google had four hundred pages in its index and overnight four hundred pages started returning an error.
It can be reliably avoided and it is not complicated. But it is work somebody has to do before launch, which is exactly why it gets skipped.
Short answer
- Start by exporting every address on the old site along with its traffic. Without that there is nothing to base the migration on and nothing to check it against.
- Every old address needs a permanent 301 redirect to the new page that replaces it. Not to the homepage.
- The most common and most expensive mistake is not a missing redirect. It is the indexing block left over from the staging site.
- A short dip after launch is normal and lasts two to six weeks. A dip that has not recovered in two months is not a dip, it is a fault.
- Rankings are lost to deleted text as reliably as to missing redirects. A redesign that halves the copy will lose positions however clean it is technically.
Why rankings get lost
Google remembers your site as a set of addresses. Each address is a separate thing to it, with its own history, its own inbound links and its own place in the results. When an address stops existing, all that history is suddenly unowned.
A redirect is a note saying: this page has moved here, and it is permanent. Google accepts it, transfers the ranking to the new address and gradually drops the old one. Without the note the old address is simply removed and the ranking has nowhere to go.
The word that matters is permanent. There are two kinds of redirect and they get confused, because in a browser they look identical.
Temporary redirect (302): says the original address is still valid and just happens to point elsewhere for now. Google keeps the old address indexed and transfers no ranking.
Permanent redirect (301): says the page has moved for good. Google replaces the old address with the new one and moves the ranking across.
Step one, and there is no point starting without it
Before a single design of the new site is drawn, there has to be a list. Not a list of the pages you remember, but a list of the addresses that actually exist and that people actually reach.
It is gathered from four places, because each one shows something the others do not.
| Source | What you get from it | What it misses |
|---|---|---|
| Google Search Console | Addresses people reach from search, and their positions | Pages with no traffic that still carry links |
| The sitemap | Addresses the site itself claims exist | Old addresses the site no longer lists |
| A crawl of the site | Everything an internal link points at | Pages nothing links to any more |
| Server logs for the last 12 months | Addresses somebody actually requested, old ones included | Nothing important, they are just harder to get |
The four lists become one, with the traffic figure written next to each address. That figure decides the order of work. A site typically has hundreds of addresses, but eighty per cent of the visits go to twenty or thirty of them. Those have to be redirected exactly; for the rest a sensible approximation will do.
What a redirect map looks like
It is a two column table. That is all. Old address on the left, new address on the right. It is written by hand for the pages that matter and by rule for the ones that share a pattern.
| Old address | New address | Note |
|---|---|---|
| /about-us.html | /about-us | Extension dropped, content unchanged |
| /services/structural-welding | /services/welding | The page was merged into another |
| /news/2019/christmas-hours | /news | Content is gone, points at the nearest whole |
| /index.php?page=contact | /contact | Address with a parameter, handled separately |
| /products/* | /range/* | One rule for a whole branch |
Five things that actually cost you rankings
Missing redirects are only one of them, and not always the worst.
| Mistake | How it shows | How long the fix takes |
|---|---|---|
| Indexing block left over from staging | The site disappears from results entirely, within days | Days to weeks after it is removed |
| Missing or wrong redirects | A gradual decline over two to six weeks | Weeks, counted from when the map goes live |
| Shortened page content | Losses on the queries the site used to appear for | Until the text comes back, so months |
| Internal links lost in the redesign | Deeper pages stop appearing at all | Weeks |
| A slower site than before | A mild decline, worst on mobile | Depends on what slowed it down |
The first row is worth explaining, because it is the most expensive mistake in the trade and it keeps happening. A staging site is supposed to be closed to search engines, otherwise half finished pages end up in the results. Closing it takes one line. And that one line is exactly what gets forgotten at launch.
The consequence is that the site disappears from the results altogether rather than gradually. Usually within days. Spotted quickly it is an annoyance. Left unnoticed for a month, because nobody watches the traffic, it becomes something that takes half a year to recover from.
The check takes ten seconds: open your site's address with /robots.txt on the end and see whether it blocks everybody. The second check is in Search Console, which flags it on its own.
The most expensive mistake at launch is one line left behind by the staging site
A procedure that works
Ten steps. The first five happen before launch, the rest after.
- 1Export every address from the four sources and add twelve months of traffic to each.
- 2Build the redirect map. By hand and one at a time for the twenty busiest addresses, by rule for the rest.
- 3Check that no text was lost on the new pages. If the old page had eight hundred words and the new one has two hundred, six hundred words of content somebody was searching for are missing.
- 4Have a new sitemap prepared and confirm every page of the new site is actually in it.
- 5The day before launch, run the checklist: indexing block removed, sitemap correct, redirects deployed, analytics working.
- 6On launch day, crawl the old list of addresses and confirm each returns a 301 pointing where it should. Not by hand, with a crawler.
- 7Submit the new sitemap to Search Console and request indexing of the most important pages.
- 8For the first week, check the 404 report daily. Any address that turns up and is not in the map goes in straight away.
- 9For four weeks, watch search traffic and the positions of your ten most important queries. A dip of up to twenty per cent in the first fortnight is normal.
- 10After two months, compare the figures with the state before launch. If they have not recovered, the cause is in the list of mistakes above, not in Google needing more time.
What if the domain moves too
Changing the site's domain is a separate job and a more delicate one than changing its looks. Everything above applies, plus three more things.
First, the old domain has to stay yours and stay paid for at least a year after the move, ideally two. Redirects have to run from somewhere, and a domain that lapses stops redirecting.
Second, the address change is reported separately in Search Console. It is a form that tells Google this is one site with a new name, not two different ones.
Third, links from elsewhere. Directories, social profiles, the Google Business Profile listing, e-mail signatures, invoices and printed material. Redirects will catch them, but the important ones are worth getting corrected, because a redirect is a crutch rather than a fix.
When losing something is fine
Not every lost page is a loss and not every dip is a fault.
Sites that ran on a content management system for ten years tend to carry hundreds of addresses nobody ever read: empty tag pages, forty variants of one news item, a press release from 2013 about a change of opening hours. Redirecting those one by one is tens of hours of work for no return. They get merged by rule, or allowed to disappear.
A temporary dip is equally fine. Google has to crawl and re-evaluate the new site, and that always takes a few weeks. The difference between a normal dip and a fault is whether it recovers on its own. If the curve is heading up after three weeks, all is well. If it is still down after two months, something broke and waiting will not fix it.
How we do it
The redirect map is part of delivery for us, not a line item. The reason is simple: without it a site cannot be launched responsibly, so there is no sense charging for it separately.
From our own work we have one documented figure so far, and it is the dull one: moving a site off WordPress we carried across 77 pages and 218 news items and merged two separate sites into one, with the retired domain redirecting and not a single address lost.
And straight away what we cannot claim: we do not yet have a long term comparison of rankings before a migration and a year after it. The site has been running a short time. When those numbers exist we will add them here, including the case where they come out badly. That is why on our first projects we measure before launch and again three months later, with permission to publish.
Frequently asked questions
How do I redesign a website without losing Google rankings?
Before launch, export every address on the old site with its traffic, build a map of old addresses to new ones and deploy permanent 301 redirects. After launch, crawl the old list, submit the new sitemap and watch 404s and positions for four weeks. At the same time make sure no text was lost on the new pages.
What is the difference between a 301 and a 302 redirect?
A 301 is permanent: it tells search engines the page has moved for good and the ranking transfers to the new address. A 302 is temporary: the old address stays valid, stays indexed and no ranking moves across. A redesign uses 301; 302 is only for genuinely temporary situations.
Can I redirect old addresses to the homepage?
You can, but there is no point. Google reads a redirect to the homepage as the content having disappeared and transfers no ranking, and the visitor lands somewhere that does not hold what they were looking for. When there genuinely is no replacement, returning a 410 (gone) is the more honest answer.
How long does it take for rankings to settle after launch?
Usually two to six weeks, depending on the size of the site. A dip of up to twenty per cent in the first fortnight is normal. What matters is the direction: a curve heading up after three weeks is ordinary re-evaluation. Still down after two months means a fault, and waiting will not fix it.
What is the most common mistake when launching a new site?
The indexing block left over from the staging site. The site then disappears from results entirely, usually within days. The check takes ten seconds: open your site's address with /robots.txt on the end and see whether it blocks all search engines.
Does a redesign have to change my page addresses?
No, and usually it should not. If the new site can keep the original address format, that is the cheapest possible migration: there is nothing to redirect and nothing to lose. Addresses change only when the structure of the site changes, or when the old ones were unreadable, full of parameters and numbers.
Summary
- The list of every address and its traffic is exported before the work starts, not before launch. Without it the migration can be neither done nor checked.
- Every old address gets a permanent 301 to a genuine replacement, not to the homepage.
- The most expensive mistake is the indexing block left over from staging. The check takes ten seconds.
- Deleted text costs rankings as reliably as missing redirects. A redesign is no reason to cut content.
- A dip lasting two to six weeks is normal. A dip still there after two months is a fault.
- If the domain moves, the old one has to stay yours and paid for another year or two. Redirects need somewhere to run from.
Got a site you do not want to lose
Send us its address. We will look at how many pages it has, how many of them get search traffic and what a rebuild would involve, and send it back in plain language. If the answer is that fixing the current site is enough, we will write that too.