How long do redirects need to stay in place?

Ideally permanently. At minimum a year, but there's rarely a good reason to remove them.

Will I lose rankings when I change my domain?

There's usually a temporary dip even when it's done perfectly. With full redirects and a change of address in Search Console, most sites recover within weeks to a few months.

Website Redesign SEO Checklist: Keep Your Rankings

Website redesign SEO checklist

Redesigns are where rankings go to die. I've seen businesses lose half their organic traffic the week a beautiful new site launched. It's almost always avoidable. Here's the checklist we use, including on this site.

In short

To redesign a website without losing rankings, crawl and record every existing URL, map each old URL to its closest new page, set up 301 redirects, keep or improve content on pages that rank, carry over titles and structured data, test on a staging site blocked from indexing, then after launch submit the new sitemap and monitor Search Console for errors and traffic drops.

Rahul Sharma, founder of Seospidy
28 September 2026 · 2 min read

Before you start designing

Crawl the current site

Record every URL, title, meta description and heading. Tools like Screaming Frog make this easy.

Export your best pages

From Search Console and Analytics: which pages get traffic, rankings and conversions? These must be protected.

Export your backlinks

Pages with external links pointing at them need redirects, even if they get little traffic.

During the build

Map every old URL to a new one

One to one where possible, otherwise to the closest relevant page. Never redirect everything to the homepage.

Keep what's working

If a page ranks well, keep its content, or improve it carefully. Don't cut text just because the new design looks cleaner without it.

Carry over the SEO basics

Titles, meta descriptions, headings, alt text, internal links and structured data.

Block the staging site

Staging sites should be password-protected or noindexed, and that rule must be removed at launch. Forgetting this is surprisingly common.

Test speed and mobile

A redesign is the best chance you'll get to fix Core Web Vitals.

At launch

Put 301 redirects live

Test a sample of old URLs, especially your top pages and those with backlinks.

Submit the new sitemap

In Google Search Console, and check robots.txt allows crawling.

Check tracking

Analytics, conversion events, call tracking and pixels all firing on the new site.

After launch

Watch Search Console daily for the first two weeks: coverage errors, 404s, drops in impressions. Some fluctuation is normal for a few weeks. A steep, lasting drop usually means redirects or indexing problems, and the sooner they're fixed, the faster you recover.

When a redesign is also a clean-up

Sometimes the right move is fewer pages. When we rebuilt seospidy.com we went from 13,066 pages to about 70 and redirected everything else. That's a bigger decision than a normal redesign. I've written up why we did it.