How do you redesign a website without losing rankings?
A website redesign SEO checklist has one job: every address Google knows on the old site must lead to the right page on the new one. List every old URL, map each to its closest new page, redirect it with a single 301, test the redirects before launch and watch Search Console for a fortnight afterwards. We ran those steps on our own site when loco.ie moved from WordPress to a new build on 16 September 2026, and the numbers are in this post. We run the same checklist on client redesigns, as set out on our website redesign page.
What is on a website redesign SEO checklist?
Thirteen steps, in four stages.
Before design
- Export every URL Google knows. Use the old sitemap and the Search Console pages report. The sitemap misses addresses Google still shows, and Search Console misses pages nobody has searched for.
- Map each old URL to a new one. Do it while the site structure can still change. A mapping written in launch week gets rushed.
- Record the queries each page ranks for. The new page has to cover the same topic, or the redirect sends Google to a page that no longer answers the search.
During build
- Keep URLs that work. A slug that stays the same needs no mapping and carries little risk.
- Write the title, description and headings for every page. Pages left with a template’s default title and headings can lose rankings even when every redirect is right.
- Carry over internal links, alt text and structured data. Keep the same GA4 and Search Console properties so the before and after can be compared.
- Keep staging out of the index. Password protection is safer than a noindex tag that can be copied to production by mistake.
At launch
- Put the redirects live with the site and test each one. Test the destination as well as the redirect.
- Remove any noindex, submit the new sitemap and read the robots file.
- Check tracking and forms. Confirm GA4 and Tag Manager fire, then send a test through every form, booking and payment flow.
After launch
- Read Search Console daily for two weeks. Look for 404s and pages Google has not picked up.
- Measure Core Web Vitals on the live server. Our guide to building a high-performance website covers what to measure.
- Compare rankings with step 3 after four to six weeks. Fix what slipped.
What should happen to each old URL in a website migration?
Every old URL gets one of four outcomes. Google’s site move guidance (as of September 2026) recommends redirecting straight to the final destination.
Scroll the table sideways for the full detail
| Old URL | What to do | Example from loco.ie |
|---|---|---|
| Same page, same slug | Keep the slug; only the trailing slash changes, in one 301 | /about-us/, /blog/ |
| Same page, new address | 301 to the new address | /projects/total-expo/ to /work/total-expo |
| Page removed, close match exists | 301 to the closest match | /consultation/ to /contact |
| No content and no match | Return 410 Gone | Old theme templates, /wp-login.php |
Google’s crawler documentation says URLs returning a 4xx status are removed from the index, so a 410 on junk is a clean ending.
What happened when we moved loco.ie?
The old WordPress sitemap listed 54 URLs. In the 480 days before the move, Google had shown 47 loco.ie addresses in search, and only 5 of them kept the same address on the new site. The other 42 carried 47 clicks and 21,174 impressions, and each one would have returned a 404 without a redirect.
Five days before launch we ran 105 URLs through a test copy of the server’s redirect rules and requested every destination. The rules passed. Eight destinations failed, because the blog posts they pointed to had not been copied into the new site yet. A redirect to a missing page is still a 404, and the test caught it while there was time to fix it.
The results, from our own Search Console property:
- Two days after launch: all 54 old URLs resolved in a single hop with no redirect chains, and 44 of the new site’s 46 URLs were indexed.
- Fourteen days after launch: all 38 old URLs that still earned impressions returned a single 301. The old addresses’ share of daily impressions fell from 58% on launch day to between 2% and 4%.
- Indexing: 23 of the 23 key URLs we inspected were indexed, and Google chose our canonical on every one.
- Visibility: daily impressions averaged 215, against 87 in the fortnight before launch, and average position moved from 26.9 to 15.1.
Fourteen days is a short window and the last two or three days of Search Console data are provisional, so we will read the same report again on 13 October 2026.
What slipped, and what did we change?
Three things did not go to plan.
Two redirects pointed at the wrong page. The old web design and app development service URLs were redirected to general service pages. Two days after launch we repointed them to the landing pages written for those searches. The old web design URL alone had 49 impressions that week.
One article ranks lower at its new address. Our post on AI-ready websites moved from /ai-ready-website/ to /blog/ai-ready-website. The old address ranked between 13 and 19 for its main queries. The new one sits between 52 and 65 for the same queries so far.
One query group disappeared. “Web application development Dublin” earned 493 impressions over the 480 days before the move and none since launch. Its old URL now redirects to a page that leads with iOS and Android apps, so the topic no longer matches. That is step 3 of the checklist, missed on our own site.
How long does Google take to process a website migration?
Weeks. Google’s guidance (as of September 2026) says a small to medium-sized site can take a few weeks for most pages to move, that larger sites take longer, and that visibility may fluctuate during the move.
Our own move fits that. Between 14 and 17 September, 23 of the 24 URLs earning impressions were still old-site addresses. Two weeks later the old addresses were down to a few per cent.
How Loco plans a redesign
A redesign at Loco starts from your analytics and Search Console data before any design work. The consult that opens the project produces the URL list, the redirect map and a costed plan, with the price fixed before design starts. Redesign projects start from €10,000 ex VAT.
Loco Digital built the Total Expo website on WordPress, live since December 2024. Loco Digital designed and rebuilt the Trident Holiday Homes website in 2024, delivered through our partner Altitude, after reading Trident’s own analytics.
The technical side of search after launch is covered in our web development SEO best practices.
