A redesign keeps its rankings when it keeps what Google already knows about your site. Every old address has to lead somewhere sensible, and the pages that bring visits need to keep saying what searchers came for. The colors, layout, photos and platform can all change.
This plan uses free tools only: Google Search Console, a free crawler or your sitemap, a spreadsheet and Bing Webmaster Tools. It follows Google’s own guide to site moves with URL changes, cut down for a small business site. It’s also the checklist our website redesign projects run on, so you can see what to expect from whoever does the work.
Before you start: get the keys
You need owner access to Search Console, the domain registrar and the current host. If a former designer holds any of them, sort that out before work begins. Our guide on who owns your website domain explains how to check and how to get access back. Don’t delete Search Console’s verification record in DNS during the switch, or you can lose access in the middle of the move.
Step 1: export what earns traffic today
In Search Console, open Performance > Search results and set the date range to the last 12 months.
- On the Pages tab, click Export and choose Google Sheets, Excel or CSV. Exports stop at 1,000 rows (Google’s export help), which covers most small business sites.
- Export the Queries tab too.
- For each of your top 20 pages, click the page to filter the report, then look at its Queries tab. Write the top three searches next to that page in your sheet.
If you use Google Analytics, also note the top pages in Reports > Engagement > Landing page. That catches pages people reach from email, ads and links, not only from search.
Step 2: list every old address
Search Console only lists pages that showed up in search. You also need the pages people bookmark or that other sites link to.
- The sitemap. Most platforms publish one at
/sitemap.xml. WordPress’s built-in sitemap lives at/wp-sitemap.xml. Open it and copy the page addresses into your sheet. - A free crawl. The free version of the Screaming Frog SEO Spider crawls up to 500 URLs and flags broken links and existing redirects. Copy the HTML page addresses it finds.
- Files. Add PDFs that get linked, such as price lists, menus or spec sheets.
Combine the lists in one column, then use Data > Data cleanup > Remove duplicates in Google Sheets.
Step 3: build the redirect sheet
Give each old address one row:
| Old URL | New URL | Status | Top searches | Tested |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| /about-us | /about-us | Keep | ||
| /services.html | /services/ | 301 | ||
| /drywall-repair-and-patching | /services/drywall-repair/ | 301 | drywall repair near me | |
| /blog/2021/05/spring-tips | /guides/spring-maintenance/ | 301 | ||
| /holiday-sale-2019 | none | 410 |
The rules that keep this sheet honest:
- Keep addresses where you can. A URL that doesn’t change needs no redirect. The cheapest redirect is the one you never write.
- Send each page to its closest match. Google warns that sending unrelated pages to a generic page such as the home page can be treated as a soft 404. If nothing on the new site covers an old page, let it return 404 or 410.
- Use permanent, server-side redirects. That means 301 or 308, per Google’s site move guide.
- Go straight to the final address. Google advises redirecting to the final destination directly. Googlebot follows up to 10 hops, but every hop is a chance to break. Redirects left over from an earlier redesign should be updated to point at the new pages, not at the old ones.
- Cover the variants. Old links may use
http://,wwwor a trailing slash. One host-level rule usually handles these. Test them anyway.
Platform moves add their own patterns. Wix blogs and stores use paths like /post/ and /product-page/, covered in our guide to moving a Wix site to another host. WordPress sites often have dated post paths like /2021/05/post-name/, plus /category/, /tag/ and /author/ pages, which our WordPress migration page goes through.
Step 4: keep what earns the traffic
For every page on your top list:
- Keep the page and its topic. Folding a page that ranks for its own search into a bigger page puts that ranking at risk.
- Keep the searched words in the title and H1. Tidy the wording if you like, but keep the terms in your “Top searches” column.
- Keep the text that answers the search. A new layout can move paragraphs around. Replacing them with a slider and a five-word headline is where rankings go missing.
- Update internal links. Google’s guide says to change links on the new site from the old URLs to the new ones, including menus and footers.
- Give each new page a self-referencing canonical tag, as Google recommends, and carry over any structured data the old pages had.
Step 5: keep the test site out of Google
Password-protect the work-in-progress site, or add a noindex tag to every page. A robots.txt block alone won’t do it: Google says robots.txt “is not a mechanism for keeping a web page out of Google” (robots.txt introduction). Write down which method you used, because it has to come off at launch. A leftover noindex tag can quietly take a whole site out of search.
Step 6: launch day
- Turn on the redirects at the same moment as the new site. If the redesign moves hosts, change only the web records (A and CNAME). Leave the MX and email TXT records alone so your email keeps arriving.
- Test every row of the sheet. Save the old addresses, one full URL per line, in a plain text file called
old-urls.txt. Then run this in a Mac or Linux terminal, or Git Bash on Windows:
tr -d '\r' < old-urls.txt | while read -r url; do curl -s -o page.tmp -L -w "%{http_code} %{num_redirects} %{url_effective}\n" "$url"; done(It saves each page to a scratch file, page.tmp, that you can delete afterward.) Each line shows the final status, the number of hops and where the address ended up. For a moved page you want 200, 1 and the new URL from your sheet. Rows marked Keep should show 200 and 0, and gone pages 410 or 404. Mark each row in the Tested column. For a handful of key pages, Google’s URL Inspection tool works too.
- Check that the block is gone. View the source of a few pages and search for
noindex, and open/robots.txtto confirm it isn’t blocking the site. - Submit the new sitemap under Indexing > Sitemaps in Search Console, and in Bing Webmaster Tools. Google says you can remove the old sitemap once it’s using the new one.
- Send a test through every form and tap the phone number on a phone.
The 30 days after launch
Week one. In Search Console’s Page indexing report, watch these reasons:
- Not found (404). Google’s Page indexing help says to redirect any page that moved. Add missed addresses to your sheet and redirect them.
- Soft 404, URL marked ‘noindex’ and URL blocked by robots.txt. On a page you want found, any of these is urgent.
In the Sitemaps report, confirm the new sitemap was read without errors and that the count of discovered pages looks right.
Weeks two to four. In Performance > Search results, use Date > Compare to set the weeks since launch against the same number of weeks before, then open the Pages tab. Google expects traffic on old addresses to fall as the new ones rise. A page whose impressions fell without its new address picking them up needs two checks: does the redirect work, and did the new page lose words the old one had? Look at Bing Webmaster Tools the same way. Our Bing Webmaster Tools guide shows where each report lives.
Expect some movement. Google says it “can take a few weeks or more” before the new URLs replace the old ones in results. Keep the redirects for good. Google’s minimum is generally a year.
How we can help
When we take on a redesign, this sheet exists before any design work does. Each old address gets a row, each redirect gets tested on launch day, and Search Console gets a month of checks afterward. No one can promise rankings, but a careful move protects the ones you have. Read how a website redesign runs with us, or tell us about your current site on our contact page.
