Every few months someone contacts me because their traffic collapsed after a redesign. In every case the cause is the same, and it is completely preventable: the new site launched with new URLs and nothing told Google where the old ones went.
A migration done properly loses nothing. Here is the order.
Before you touch anything
- 1Crawl the existing site and export every URL. Screaming Frog’s free tier handles up to 500, which covers most small business sites. This list is the single most important artefact of the whole project.
- 2Export your top pages from Search Console, sorted by clicks and impressions over the last twelve months. These are the URLs that must not break, ranked by how much it would hurt.
- 3Export the current title and meta description for every page. You will want to know what you are replacing before you replace it.
- 4Record your current rankings and monthly organic traffic. Without a baseline you cannot tell a migration problem from normal fluctuation, and you will spend three weeks arguing about it.
- 5Note every inbound link you know about. Directories, suppliers, press, the chamber of commerce. Those point at specific URLs.
Build the redirect map
A spreadsheet with two columns: every old URL, and the new URL it should land on. Every single one. No exceptions, no "we will sort the rest later".
- Map to the closest equivalent page, never to the homepage. A bulk redirect of everything to the homepage is treated as a soft 404 and throws away the equity you were trying to keep.
- Use 301, not 302. A 302 says temporary and does not pass authority the same way.
- Redirect once. Old URL straight to final URL. Chains of two and three hops leak authority and slow the page.
- If a page genuinely has no equivalent, let it 404 deliberately. An honest 404 is better than a misleading redirect.
The redirect map is the migration. Everything else is decoration on top of it.
Carry the meaning across, not just the text
Keep the title tags and meta descriptions that were already earning clicks. If you improve them, improve them deliberately, one at a time, after launch — not silently during a migration where you cannot attribute the effect.
The same goes for headings and page structure. A page that ranked for a term and no longer contains that term will stop ranking for it, and the redesign will get the blame.
Launch day
- 1Check that robots.txt is not blocking the site. A staging-environment robots.txt shipped to production is the classic way to deindex yourself overnight.
- 2Check that no page carries a leftover noindex tag from staging.
- 3Submit the new XML sitemap in Search Console.
- 4Test a sample of redirects by hand, including the top twenty pages by traffic.
- 5Verify the new property in Search Console if the domain changed, and use the Change of Address tool.
The following weeks
Expect a dip. A short one is normal while Google recrawls and reassesses; two to four weeks of mild turbulence is not a failure. What is not normal is a sustained fall past six weeks.
Watch the Pages report in Search Console for a rise in "Not found" errors, which means redirects are missing, and for "Crawled – currently not indexed", which usually means the new pages are too thin. Check weekly, not daily. Daily will only make you anxious about noise.
