The phone call usually comes about three weeks after launch. The new site looks great, everyone’s happy, and the enquiries have dropped off a cliff. When we look, the cause is almost always the same: the old pages that ranked were deleted, renamed or merged, and nobody told Google where they went.
A rebuild doesn’t have to cost you rankings. Almost every loss we’ve cleaned up came from steps being skipped, not from anything mysterious. This is the order we work in.
Before you design anything: record what you’ve got
You can’t protect what you haven’t measured. Do this before the old site is touched, and ideally before the new design is even agreed.
Crawl the old site
Use a crawler to list every URL on the current site. Screaming Frog SEO Spider is the standard tool, and its free version crawls up to 500 URLs, which covers most small business sites. Export the list to a spreadsheet.
Then add the pages the crawler might have missed:
- Pages listed in your XML sitemap (usually at yourdomain.com.au/sitemap.xml or /sitemap_index.xml)
- Old PDFs, price lists and forms people still link to
- Landing pages from past ad campaigns
- Pages linked from your Google Business Profile, social profiles and directories
Find out which pages earn their keep
In Google Search Console, go to Performance, set the date range to the last 12 months, and look at the Pages tab. Export it. These are the pages Google sends people to. Add clicks and impressions to your spreadsheet next to each URL.
Then check the Links report for pages other sites link to. A supplier or association linking to an old page is valuable, and you don’t want that link landing on an error.
If you have Google Analytics, note which pages lead to enquiries. A page with modest traffic but lots of quote requests is more important than a popular blog post that never converts.
Save copies of the important pages
For every page that gets meaningful search traffic, save its title tag, meta description, main heading and body copy. A quick way is to save each one as a PDF. When the new copy is written, you can compare and make sure you haven’t dropped the words and topics that were making it rank.
During the build: keep what ranks
This is where good intentions go wrong. A new site is a chance to tidy up, and tidying up can mean cutting exactly the pages Google liked.
Some rules we follow:
- Keep URLs the same where you can. If /hot-water-systems/ ranks, the new page should live at /hot-water-systems/ too. No redirect is better than a good redirect.
- Don’t merge ranking pages without a reason. Five service pages condensed into one “Services” page usually loses ground for all five searches.
- Keep the substance of the copy. Rewrite for clarity by all means, but don’t cut a 900-word page that ranks down to 150 words under a nice photo.
- Carry over titles and headings on pages that perform well, unless they’re poor. Improve them carefully.
- Block the staging site from search engines while it’s being built, so Google doesn’t index a half-finished copy.
If you’re still deciding whether you need a rebuild at all, our guide on whether to redesign or refresh may save you the job.
Map every old URL to a new one
Add a column to your spreadsheet: “new URL”. Fill it in for every old URL. Each one should go to the closest matching new page.
| Old URL | New URL |
|---|---|
| /services/hot-water/ | /hot-water-systems/ |
| /blog/2021/06/gas-vs-solar/ | /resources/gas-vs-solar-hot-water/ |
| /our-team.html | /about/ |
| /specials-winter-2022/ | /hot-water-systems/ (closest relevant page) |
Google’s site move guidance says not to send lots of old URLs to an irrelevant page like the homepage, and to redirect straight to the final address rather than through a chain. If a page genuinely has no equivalent and nothing links to it, it’s fine to let it go, but make that a decision, not an accident.
Our detailed guide to 301 redirects covers how to set these up in WordPress and on the server.
Launch day
Go through this list in order, on the day:
- Remove the “discourage search engines” setting or noindex tag from the new site. This is the single most common launch mistake we see. In WordPress, check Settings, then Reading.
- Put the redirects live.
- Test 20 or so old URLs from your spreadsheet, including your top performers. Each should land on the right new page in one hop.
- Check that every page loads on https and on one version of the domain (with or without www).
- Submit the new XML sitemap in Search Console.
- Use URL Inspection in Search Console on your homepage and top three service pages, and request indexing.
- Check that your contact forms send, your phone numbers are clickable and your tracking codes are firing.
- Update the website link on your Google Business Profile if any addresses changed.
The first three months after launch
Google’s guidance is that rankings may fluctuate temporarily while it recrawls, and that a medium-sized site can take a few weeks or longer to settle. Small sites often settle quicker. What you’re watching for is a drop that doesn’t recover.
Week 1: Check Search Console daily for new errors in the Pages report, especially “Not found (404)”. Any 404 for an old URL means a missing redirect. Add it.
Weeks 2 to 4: Compare clicks for your top pages against the same weeks before launch. Look page by page, not just the site total.
Months 2 to 3: Look at queries that used to bring traffic. If a search term has dropped away, find the old page that ranked for it and compare it with the new one. Usually a section of content or a heading has gone missing.
Keep the redirects in place permanently. Google recommends at least a year, and there’s no benefit in ever removing them on a small site.
What to ask your web designer
Before you sign off on a rebuild, ask:
- Will you crawl and record the current site before starting?
- Who’s responsible for the redirect map?
- Will URLs that currently rank stay the same?
- Who checks Search Console after launch, and for how long?
If the answer to any of these is a blank look, raise it now rather than three weeks after launch. Redirect mapping and post-launch checks are how we handle rebuilds through our web design service. If you’re mid-rebuild with someone else and worried, our SEO team can do the audit and redirect plan on its own. Get in touch before launch day if you can.