When redesigning your website, maintaining and improving SEO should be a top priority. Here’s how to ensure your redesign doesn’t hurt your search rankings and actually improves them:
Pre-Redesign SEO Planning
- Conduct a full SEO audit of your current site
- Document all ranking pages, backlinks, and traffic sources
- Identify top-performing content to preserve
- Create a content inventory
- Map all existing URLs with their metrics (traffic, rankings, conversions)
- Categorize content by importance (keep, update, redirect, delete)
- Preserve your URL structure when possible
- Changing URLs requires proper 301 redirects
- Maintain existing internal linking patterns
During the Redesign
- Maintain core SEO elements
- Keep or improve title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags
- Preserve or enhance content quality and depth
- Ensure technical SEO fundamentals
- Mobile responsiveness (Google prioritizes mobile-first indexing)
- Fast page load speeds
- Clean, semantic HTML structure
- Proper use of canonical tags
- Implement proper redirects for any changed URLs
- 301 redirects pass most link equity
- Avoid chains of redirects
Post-Launch SEO Checklist
- Verify indexability
- Check robots.txt and meta robots tags
- Submit new XML sitemap to Search Console
- Monitor for issues
- Track rankings and traffic fluctuations
- Check for 404 errors and fix redirects
- Verify Google can render JavaScript content
- Update external references
- Fix backlinks pointing to old URLs where possible
- Update social media and directory listings
Common Pitfalls to Avoid
- Launching without proper redirect mapping
- Changing URL structure without preserving link equity
- Removing or significantly altering high-performing content
- Forgetting to optimize new content before launch
- Neglecting to test the new site’s mobile experience
A well-executed redesign with proper SEO planning can actually improve your search visibility rather than harming it. The key is maintaining what works while improving what doesn’t.
