Redesigning without losing your rankings
The classic scenario: gorgeous new site, traffic cut to a third. A redesign is a migration, and Google documents the exact procedure for moving without losing anything. The mapping plan, piece by piece.
It is the saddest story in the trade, and the most avoidable. A company redoes its website, more beautiful, faster, more accurate. Three weeks after launch, the phone rings less. Nobody makes the connection: it is the new site, surely better. Six months of lost traffic later, someone finally looks at Search Console.
A redesign is a migration
What kills the traffic is almost never the new design: it is the addresses. The typical redesign changes the URL of every page, and every page whose address changes without a redirect starts from zero, as the article on 301s explained page by page. Google in fact covers the subject under that exact name, site move, with a recommended procedure whose essence fits in one piece: the mapping plan.
The mapping plan is a two-column table: every address on the old site, and the address on the new one that takes over its role. It is drawn up before launch, never after, from the real list of old pages, the one in the sitemap or the indexing report. Pages with no direct heir get an explicit decision: redirect to the parent page of the subject, or accept the 404 for abandoned content, following the sorting from the previous article.
Launch day and the weeks after
At launch, the plan’s redirects go live at the same time as the new site, not “the following week”: every day of gap is a day when visitors and crawlers knock on locked doors. The sitemap is updated with the new addresses, and Search Console stays open in the weeks that follow, on two reports: indexing, to check that the new pages do enter the index, and performance, to compare clicks before and after on the pages that matter.
Google honestly warns that even a well-run migration comes with temporary fluctuations while the index reorganises itself. The difference between the fluctuation and the haemorrhage is precisely the mapping plan: a few weeks of wobble versus months of rebuilding.
The questions to ask before signing
A redesign is usually commissioned. Three questions to the provider separate those who know from those who will find out at your expense. Will the current addresses be kept, and if not, who draws up the mapping plan? Will the redirects be live on switchover day? Who watches Search Console the following month, and what do they compare? A provider who answers “we’ll sort that out after launch” is announcing, without knowing it, the opening paragraph of this article.
Who writes these notes
This journal is kept by the workshop that designs and maintains the house’s websites. Everything described here, the Search Console, internal links, the business profile, is part of the work delivered with a site: if you would rather someone took care of it, that is precisely the trade.