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Migration

How to redesign without losing your rankings

The horror story is real and it's common: a business spends good money on a beautiful new site, launches it, and watches enquiries fall off a cliff for three months. It is almost entirely preventable, and it's prevented by a handful of unglamorous steps that take a day and are routinely skipped.

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In short

Keep your URLs wherever you can. Where you can't, map every old URL to the closest new one with a 301 redirect before launch. Preserve the content and titles of pages that already rank, keep staging blocked from indexing, and verify redirects and Search Console the day you go live.

What actually works

  1. Inventory every URL before you touch anything

    Crawl the existing site, and pull every page that has had a visit or an impression in the last twelve months from analytics and Search Console. That list is the specification for the redirect map. Do it first — after launch the old site may be gone.

  2. Keep the URLs if you possibly can

    The safest migration changes no addresses at all. Every URL you change is a redirect to maintain and a small amount of signal to lose. 'Tidier URLs' is rarely worth the risk on a site that already ranks.

  3. Map old to new, one to one

    Every changed URL gets a 301 to the closest equivalent page. Not the homepage — a bulk redirect to the homepage is treated as a soft 404 and loses everything. If there's genuinely no equivalent, a proper 404 or 410 is better than a misleading redirect.

  4. Don't quietly delete the content that ranks

    Redesigns love to cut words. If a page ranks, the words are part of why. Keep the headings and the substance, keep the title and meta description unless you have a reason, and rewrite for clarity rather than for brevity.

  5. Keep staging out of the index

    Password-protect it, or serve noindex plus a robots disallow. A staging site that gets indexed competes with the real one, and the real risk is the opposite mistake: shipping the noindex to production on launch day. Check it the moment you go live.

  6. Launch when it's quiet, and check immediately

    Not Friday afternoon. Straight after cutover: test a sample of redirects, confirm production is indexable, submit the new sitemap, and check the top twenty pages return 200s.

  7. Expect a wobble, not a collapse

    A week or two of movement while Google re-crawls is normal. A sustained fall is not — and it's nearly always redirects. Watch Search Console daily for a fortnight and treat a rising 404 count as an alarm.

  8. Keep the redirects. Forever.

    They aren't temporary. Old links from other sites, old emails, old printed material all keep arriving for years. Removing redirects a year later is a self-inflicted second migration.

Launch-day checklist

Run through this before and immediately after cutover. It's the difference between a wobble and a disaster.

  • Full crawl of the old site saved, plus twelve months of URLs from analytics and Search Console
  • Redirect map covering every changed URL, one to one
  • Redirects tested on staging, including a sample from the long tail
  • Titles, meta descriptions and headings preserved for pages that rank
  • Production is indexable — no stray noindex, no robots disallow
  • New XML sitemap generated and submitted
  • Analytics and conversion tracking confirmed firing on the new site
  • Forms tested end to end, on a phone
  • Search Console coverage and 404 reports watched daily for two weeks
  • Old site backed up and retained until you're certain

When this isn't your problem

If your current site gets very little organic traffic, most of this is ceremony — you have little to lose and you should spend the effort on making the new site good. The care matters in proportion to what's already working. If you rank for terms that bring you business, treat the migration as the highest-risk part of the project, not an afterthought.

Want us to look at it?

Send us your site and what you're trying to improve. We'll tell you what we'd do first — including when the honest answer is that you don't need us.

Email

jayson@pixelapps.com.au

Location

Macedon Ranges, Victoria

Serving clients across Australia

Common questions

Only if it's done carelessly. Sites that keep their URLs, redirect everything they change, and preserve the content that ranks typically see a week or two of movement and then recover. Sites that skip the redirect map can lose most of their organic traffic for months.

A well-executed migration settles in one to four weeks. If rankings are still down after six weeks, something is wrong — usually missing redirects, a stray noindex, or content that was cut without anyone noticing.

Only with a specific reason. Every change costs a little and adds a redirect to maintain forever. Aesthetic tidiness is not worth it on a site that already ranks; a genuinely broken structure sometimes is.

Usually, yes. We crawl the old site from archives, rebuild the redirect map, restore the content that was cut, and fix any indexing blocks. Recovery is generally weeks rather than months, and the sooner it's caught the more complete it is.

Also worth a look

Last reviewed . Figures are indicative Australian ranges, not quotes.