Redesigning your website without losing what the old one had earned

一Why a redesign so often makes traffic fall

In Google's eyes, your website is not a shop window to be repainted: it is a collection of addresses, each with its own history. One service page has appeared for years on a specific search, another receives links from a directory or a partner, yet another is the entry point for a good share of your customers. A redesign that ignores this history starts again from zero without knowing it. The new website may be more beautiful, faster, better written: if it has lost the addresses Google knew, it has to win its place back.

The causes of a fall are almost always the same, and almost always avoidable. They do not come from a whim on Google's part, but from decisions taken without measuring their effect. Here they are.

• Addresses changed without a redirect: the old page known to Google leads to a page that cannot be found (a 404 error), and the place it held is lost.
• Pages deleted or emptied even though they appeared in the results; a text cut down to a few lines no longer answers the search that brought visitors in.
• Titles and content rewritten for no reason, out of a taste for novelty, on pages that were working.
• Broken internal links, which leave visitors and search engine crawlers at dead ends.
• Staging protections forgotten at launch: a noindex tag, or a robots.txt file asking search engines not to crawl, copied onto the public website.
• A badly announced change of domain name, which leaves Google to discover on its own a website it does not know.

One image guides us in this work, that of kintsugi: in Japan, a cracked bowl is mended with lacquer and gold rather than thrown away, and the repair becomes part of its history. A good redesign works in the same way. You keep what has value, you join the old to the new with care, and every seam is made to hold.

二Start with an inventory of what exists

Before drawing the slightest mock-up, you need to know what you own. The inventory consists of listing every address on the current website, then identifying those that matter. It is thankless work, often skipped for lack of time, and yet it decides whether the redesign succeeds. An address forgotten in the inventory will be forgotten in the redirects, and nobody will notice until visits start to drop.

1. 一
   List every address

   Have the current website explored by a crawling tool, and retrieve the site map (the sitemap.xml file) if there is one. Add the pages missing from the menu: old offers, articles, campaign pages.

2. 二
   Find those Google knows

   In Google Search Console, the Pages report shows the indexed addresses. These are the ones the new website must take care of, without exception.

3. 三
   Find those that receive clicks

   The Performance report in Search Console shows, page by page, the clicks that came from Google and the searches that brought them. Export it: it is the list of your precious pages.

4. 四
   Find the entry points

   Your audience measurement tool shows the pages through which visitors arrive on the website. A frequent entry page deserves the same care as a well-ranked one.

5. 五
   Find the links from elsewhere

   The Links report in Search Console shows the pages that receive links from other websites. These links are capital: they must keep leading somewhere.

At the end of this inventory you hold a simple table: one row per old address, with what it receives (clicks, links, visits) and what it will become. That table is then turned into the redirect plan. It also acts as a safeguard during design: a precious page does not vanish from the structure unless someone has decided so with full knowledge of the facts.

三The 301 redirect plan

A 301 redirect is an instruction given by the server: ‘this page has moved permanently, here is its new address’. The visitor following an old link lands on the right page without noticing, and Google passes on to the new address the signals the old one had accumulated. It is the thread that joins the old website to the new one, and the centrepiece of any redesign. A temporary redirect (302) says something else: for a permanent move, the 301 is the right one.

Three rules make a good plan. First, a single step: the old address leads straight to the new one, without intermediaries; chains (from A to B, then from B to C) slow the visitor down and multiply the chances of breaking a link. Next, the closest page in meaning: the old ‘Hair colour’ page leads to the new ‘Hair colour’ page, not to the ‘Our services’ page. Finally, no mass redirect to the home page, which looks like a solution and is not one.

Sometimes a page truly has no equivalent any more: a discontinued offer, a past event. It can then return a 404 error (page not found) or a 410 (page permanently removed), which is honest and understood by search engines. Conversely, we keep alive addresses that might seem secondary. When we moved the sharing images of our own website (the ones that appear when a link is pasted into a messaging app), we left a 301 redirect on each of the old addresses: links already shared on WhatsApp or LinkedIn thus keep their preview.

四What to keep

The best redirect is the one you do not need. If the structure allows it, keep the addresses of pages that work exactly as they are: nothing beats a page that does not move. When an address has to change, let it be for a good reason (a clearer name, a more logical structure), not a matter of taste. Every change of address is a small risk, and it must bring in more than it costs.

Keep the substance of the pages that receive clicks, too. Their title, their description and their first visible heading (the H1) have often taken time to find their place; rewriting them all at the same time as the design means changing two things at once and no longer knowing which one made the results drop. If you want to improve them, do so knowingly, with the help of our article on the title, the description and the H1.

• The alternative text of images, which describes photographs to search engines and to visually impaired people.
• Structured data (address, opening hours, frequently asked questions), which helps Google understand the page.
• Internal linking: important pages must stay connected to one another and within a click's reach of the home page.
• Audience measurement, installed and checked on the new website before launch, without which you will have nothing to compare.

五Launch day

Launch is the moment when oversights cost the most, because they affect the whole website at once. During construction, the new website often lives at a staging address protected from search engines; those protections must disappear at the precise moment it goes public. The safest course is to protect the staging site with a password rather than with a single tag: there is then nothing left in the code to forget. Plan the switch for a quiet moment, keep time for the checks, and carry them out in the following order.

• Remove the non-indexing instruction inherited from staging (the noindex tag): it asks search engines not to show the page, and a whole website can vanish from Google because of it.
• Reread the crawling instructions in the robots.txt file: they must not forbid crawling of the public website.
• A single form of address: with or without ‘www’, always in https, with the other forms redirected in 301 to that one.
• Correct canonical tags (rel="canonical"), pointing to the new address of each page, never to the staging one.
• An up-to-date site map (sitemap.xml), listing only the new addresses, submitted in Google Search Console.
• A useful 404 page, offering paths to the main pages rather than a dead end.
• Internal links to the new addresses, directly, without relying on redirects to make the journey.

On the question of address forms, we apply the rule to our own website: an address ending in ‘.html’ is permanently redirected to the same address without the extension, and the canonical tag declares the latter. Each page therefore has only one address, and Google does not have to choose between two copies of the same content. After the switch, test the most precious old addresses in your inventory for yourself: each must arrive, in a single step, on the right page.

六The weeks that follow

A redesign does not end on launch day. Google has to crawl the website again, follow the redirects and carry the signals over to the new addresses, and this work takes time. A few weeks of fluctuation in rankings is common, even when everything has been done properly; there is no need to panic, nor to let it settle in without looking. What matters is the trend, and the ability to spot quickly what is wrong.

• The Pages report in Search Console: pages not found or excluded from the index must be understood one by one.
• The Performance report: compare the clicks and positions of the precious pages with the period before the redesign.
• 404 errors in the server logs: they reveal the old addresses forgotten in the redirect plan.
• The speed of the new pages, which must be at least as good as that of the old ones; we explain this in our article on speed.

It also happens that a report stays wrong when everything is right. On our own website, a site map was first declared in Search Console at a wrong address, without its ‘.xml’; once the declaration was corrected, it stayed in error. The same file, served at a new address, was read straight away. The lesson goes beyond this case: when every check is good and the tool persists, changing the address lets you tell a faulty file from a damaged record.

七When the domain name changes

Changing domain name (moving from an old name to a new one, on a change of brand for example) is the most delicate form of redesign. Every address changes at once, and Google has to understand that it is the same website under another name. All the previous rules apply, with even greater rigour: every page on the old domain must lead, through a 301 redirect, to its equivalent page on the new one, and not to the new domain's home page.

Google Search Console offers a Change of Address tool for this, to be used once the redirects are in place and both domains are verified in your account. Google recommends keeping the redirects for as long as possible, generally at least a year. Above all, keep the old domain name: do not let it expire, because it carries the links accumulated over the years, and a third party could buy it.

Whether it is a new design or a new name, the method stays the same: know what you have, decide what each page becomes, join the old to the new, then check. That is how we lead redesigns in web design. Search engine optimisation is involved from the inventory onwards, rather than called to the rescue after the fall.

A successful redesign does not wipe the slate clean: it mends and it connects.