Website redesign: the method to keep your search rankings

A redesign can wipe out, in a few days, visibility built up over years. It is not the redesign itself that loses rankings, but what it breaks along the way: addresses that change without redirects, deleted content, pages that have become inaccessible.

Well prepared, a redesign can actually improve search rankings. Here is the method, with the concrete example of this website's own redesign.

Why a redesign loses traffic

Google does not rank "websites" but addresses (URLs). Each page that appears in the results has accumulated signals: links from other websites, content judged relevant for certain searches, a history. If its address changes without a redirect, Google finds a 404 error instead, and the links that pointed to it lead nowhere.

The most common causes of loss:

• addresses changed without redirects;
• content shortened or deleted, which answers searches less well than before;
• lost tags: titles, descriptions, canonical tags, structured data;
• a noindex directive from the staging site pushed live with the new website;
• pages that are no longer connected to each other by internal links.

Before: take stock of what already brings you results

The pages that receive visits and links

Before the first mockup, list what needs to be protected:

• in Search Console, Performance report, Pages tab: the pages that receive clicks and impressions over the last twelve months;
• in the Links report of Search Console: the pages most linked to from other websites;
• the complete list of the current website's addresses, obtained with a crawler (Screaming Frog, for example, crawls up to 500 addresses for free).

The queries to protect

For each important page, note the searches that lead to it (Queries tab, filtered on the page). The new version of the page must still answer them: if a paragraph attracted visitors, deleting it for the sake of a cleaner design means giving up those visits.

Keeping or changing URLs: the decision that matters most

The rule is simple: keep every address that can be kept. Changing a readable address brings almost nothing in SEO terms, while the risk is real.

A change is justified when:

• the old address is unreadable (/page.php?id=123);
• the content genuinely changes in nature;
• several pages are merged into one;
• the website becomes multilingual, and each language needs its own addresses.

This website is an example. Its first pages were called /about and /projects, in English, while the website was in French. As long as it existed only in French, translating them would have brought nothing in SEO terms: Google understands these words, and addresses that may have been shared for a long time (LinkedIn, résumés, emails) would have had to be redirected. So they were kept at first.

The decision changed when an English version of the website was planned: /about would then have to point to the English page, and mixing languages in the addresses would make the structure confusing, for visitors and for Google alike. The French addresses became /a-propos and /projets, with a permanent redirect from the old ones. An address change justified by a structural reason, not by a matter of taste.

Building the 301 redirect plan

One old URL, one new URL

The redirect plan is a simple table:

Old address	New address	Reason	Tested
/our-services.html	/services	Same content, new structure	Yes
/team	/about	Pages merged	Yes

Each old address points to the closest equivalent page on the new website. If there really is no equivalent, the closest parent page will do for the visitor.

Common mistakes

• Temporary redirects (302, 307) instead of permanent ones. Google recommends permanent redirects, such as 301 and 308: a temporary redirect signals that the old address will come back.
• Chains (A redirects to B, which redirects to C). Send directly to the final destination.
• Redirecting everything to the homepage. Google advises against mass-redirecting old addresses to a single page, such as the homepage: it may treat them as deleted pages ("soft 404" errors).
• Forgetting the variants: with and without www, http and https, with and without a trailing slash.
• Forgetting files: PDFs, images that rank well in Google Images.

Launch day: the checklist

1. Remove the noindex directive and the robots.txt block inherited from staging.
2. Test every line of the redirect plan: 301 or 308 code, direct destination, no chain.
3. Check the title, description, canonical tag and main heading (H1) of the main pages.
4. Submit the new sitemap in Search Console.
5. Request indexing of the main pages with the URL Inspection tool.
6. Send yourself a request through the contact form, and check your measurement tools.

After: what to monitor

Fluctuations are normal for a few weeks, while Google crawls the website again. Monitor:

• the Pages report in Search Console: new 404 errors, pages excluded from the index;
• the Performance report: clicks and impressions per page, compared with the period before the redesign;
• the redirects themselves: Google recommends keeping them for as long as possible, generally at least one year.

If an important page loses its rankings for good, compare its old and new versions: content that has disappeared is often the cause.

Example: this website's redesign

In October 2026, I tightened this portfolio: ten pages of older projects and the Experience page were removed. Then, while preparing the English version, the addresses that were still in English were translated. Finally, the projects lost their individual pages: clicking on a project now opens the delivered website directly. Every old address received a permanent redirect:

Old address	New address	Why
The 10 removed /projects/… pages	/projets	No equivalent: the project list is the closest page
/experience	/a-propos	The career path is now on the About page
/about	/a-propos	Address translated before the English version
/projects	/projets	Address translated before the English version
Each project page (/projects/…, /projets/…)	/projets	Projects open directly on their website: the list is the closest page

When /about became /a-propos, the redirect from /experience, which pointed to /about, was changed to point directly to /a-propos. Without this fix, a visitor arriving through the old address would have gone through two successive redirects: exactly the chain to avoid.

The website is built with Next.js, which uses the 308 code, the modern equivalent of 301. For the ten projects, redirecting to the list was a deliberate choice: these pages had no equivalent, and the goal was to guide visitors arriving through an old link, not to pass on their rankings.

The same redesign fixed an inconsistency between the www and non-www versions of the website, detailed in the guide for a website missing from Google.

A redesign is therefore prepared well before the design: it is the inventory of what exists that decides what can change. It is the starting point of every website redesign I lead. And if you are torn between fixing your website and rebuilding it, an audit will settle it.