Website relaunch without losing rankings: a guide

Before launch: what you must protect

List every address

Crawl the old site and also export the pages with clicks from Search Console. Add pages with external links. This list is the basis for everything else.

Mark the most important pages

A small share of pages usually brings most of the visits. For these, keep or improve the content, and never remove it without a replacement. The most common relaunch problem is not technical: well-performing text gets cut because it was “too long” for the new design.

Save your baseline

Note clicks, impressions and positions for key terms, along with monthly enquiries. Without a baseline you cannot judge what happened later.

The redirect table

Every old address gets a destination:

Case	Action
Address stays the same	Do nothing. This is the best outcome.
Address changes	301 redirect to the matching new page
Content merged	301 to the merged page
Content dropped with no replacement	410 or 404, with no blanket redirect to the home page

Google often treats blanket redirects to the home page as errors. Also avoid chains of several redirects.

Testing before the switch

Build on a protected test environment and keep Google out, preferably with a password. Before launch, check:

Is all the content of important pages on the new pages?
Are titles, descriptions, headings and structured data right?
Do internal links point to the new addresses?
Do forms and tracking really work?
Do all redirects work, tested automatically against your table?
Are canonicals and, with several languages, hreflang right?
How do Core Web Vitals look on the key templates?

On moving day

Pick a quiet date, not just before your main season
Make a full backup of the old site
Check that the test environment’s noindex and password are gone
Check robots.txt; a forgotten “Disallow: /” really does happen
Submit the new sitemap
If the domain changes, use the Change of Address tool in Search Console

After launch

Check errors and indexing daily in the first week, then weekly. Temporary fluctuations are normal while Google processes the new site. If important pages collapse, though, compare them with your list. The cause is nearly always a missing redirect or cut content. Keep the old redirects active afterwards; Google recommends at least a year.

When you do not need a relaunch

If the technical base is sound and only the look is dated, a rework is often enough, at lower cost and lower risk. The analysis settles this before the quote. How much does a website cost? covers what drives the price. To get it done: Web design with tob-apps.

Website relaunch without losing rankings