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A redesign is usually sold as a fresh start. For search it is the opposite. Google ranks the pages you have, at the addresses they have, for the words on them and the links pointing at them. Change those carelessly and the new site starts with less than the old one had. Change them on purpose, one URL at a time, and a redesign can keep every ranking while changing almost everything a visitor sees.
I'm Ignat, founder of DIXI. We redesign and rebuild websites for B2B SaaS teams and D2C brands, and on 29 October 2026 we switched our own site to a redesign built on a new platform. This is the checklist we use, with the reason behind each step and the numbers from our own switch.
- Keep every URL that has clicks, impressions or links. If one has to change, give it one permanent (301 or 308) redirect to its closest new page: never a chain, never a blanket redirect to the homepage.
- Keep what earned the ranking: the text that answers each page's queries, its title and H1, its internal links and its structured data. A cleaner page that drops those answers is the most common quiet loss.
- Test the new site on staging against the old one, launch with the redirects, a clean robots.txt and a new sitemap, and watch Search Console weekly for 90 days. Google says a small to medium site can take a few weeks for most pages to move.
- Keep the domain if you can. Across 892 domain migrations, traffic took 523 days on average to come back, and 17% never did within 1,000 days.
Why do website redesigns lose rankings?
Redesigns lose rankings when they change what Google attached the rankings to: the URL, the content on it, the links pointing at it, or Google's ability to crawl and read the page. The design itself is rarely the problem. The usual causes are URLs that change without a one-to-one redirect, sections cut because they didn't fit the new layout, internal links that disappear with the old navigation, and a staging setting such as noindex that ships to production.
| Cause | What happens | How to catch it before launch |
|---|---|---|
| URLs change without redirects | Old pages return 404, and their rankings and links stop counting for the new pages | Crawl the old URL list against staging: every URL returns 200 or one 301 |
| Redirects to the homepage | Visitors and crawlers land on a page that doesn't answer the query the old page ranked for | Map each URL to its closest new page; return 404 or 410 for content you retire |
| Content that ranked is cut | The new page no longer answers the queries the old one ranked for | List each page's top queries in Search Console and find each answer on the new design |
| Titles and H1s rewritten | The page stops using the words people search for | Carry titles over unless you change one on purpose, and note why |
| Internal links thin out | Pages lose the menu, footer and related links that pointed at them | Compare internal links per URL, old crawl against staging crawl |
| Text that needs JavaScript | Crawlers that don't run scripts, including most AI crawlers, see a page without its text or links | Check the raw HTML of each template for the main text and the links |
| noindex or robots.txt from staging | Pages drop out of the index within days | Check robots.txt and the robots meta tag on production within the hour |
| A new domain at the same time | Every signal has to move, and recovery can take months | Keep the domain; if it must change, change it separately |
How risky is your redesign?
It depends less on how different the new site looks than on how many URLs, words and links change, and on whether the domain changes. A new design on the same URLs and content is low risk. A new URL structure is medium risk, because every redirect has to be right. A new domain is the riskiest move a site can make.
| What changes | Risk | What to plan for |
|---|---|---|
| Design only: same URLs, same content | Low | Titles, content and internal links survive the new templates; no redirects needed |
| Design and copy, same URLs | Low to medium | For each page, the answers to its top queries are still on it |
| New platform, same URLs | Low to medium | Rendering, speed, metadata, structured data, and redirects for URLs the old platform made on its own, such as language copies or paginated lists |
| New URL structure, same domain | Medium | A full redirect map, internal links updated, a rebuilt sitemap |
| New domain or subdomain | High | Change of Address in Search Console, a redirect for every URL, and months of recovery: 523 days on average in the 892 moves studied |
Recovery figures: Dan Taylor, How long should an SEO migration take?, Search Engine Journal, January 2025, measured with third-party traffic estimates.
Google's own site-move guide says to change one thing at a time: if you plan a new domain, a new CMS and a new layout, do them one after the other. We follow a softer version of that rule. A new design and a new platform can land together when the domain and the URLs stay the same, because then nothing a search engine relies on has to move. When the domain or the URL structure must change too, we split the work.
What should you record before changing anything?
A copy of everything that earns traffic today, saved before the first design file. You will use it twice: to decide what the new site has to keep, and to show after launch whether anything was lost.
- Pages with clicks or impressions in the last 12 to 16 months, exported
- The top queries for each of those pages
- Linked pages from the Links report
- The sitemaps you submit today
- Landing pages with organic sessions and conversions
- Which pages start demo requests, trials or orders
- A 4 to 8 week baseline for the metric you'll judge the redesign by
- Every URL with its status code, title, meta description, H1 and canonical
- Internal links pointing at each URL
- Structured data types for each template
- Images and PDFs that get traffic or links
- Core Web Vitals for the main templates in PageSpeed Insights
- Field data from the Core Web Vitals report, if the site has enough traffic
Search Console and your analytics are free and enough for most SaaS sites. For the crawl we use Screaming Frog; its free version crawls up to 500 URLs, which covers most SaaS marketing sites. The rule that comes out of the inventory is simple: any URL with clicks, impressions or external links in the last year either keeps its address or gets a redirect.
How do you build the redirect map?
Put every URL from the inventory in one sheet and decide, for each one, whether it keeps its address, moves to a new address with one permanent redirect, or is retired, and write down why. On most SaaS marketing sites the majority of pages should keep their address; the map is for the ones that can't.
| Old URL | New URL | Action | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
/pricing | /pricing | Keep | Ranks for brand and pricing queries; linked from review sites |
/features/reporting | /product/reporting | 301 | New product section; same content, expanded |
/solutions/agencies | /use-cases/agencies | 301 | Section renamed in the new navigation |
/blog/2023/05/onboarding-tips | /blog/onboarding-tips | 301 | Dates removed from blog URLs |
/en/pricing | /pricing | 301 | An old language copy of the same page |
/webinar-march-2024 | none | 410 | Past event, no equivalent page, no links |
Example map for a typical SaaS site, not a client's data.
- One hop. Every old URL points straight at its final address. Google follows up to 10 redirects in a chain but advises redirecting to the final destination directly.
- The closest match, not the homepage. If no page replaces the old one, return 404 or 410, as Google's site-move guide asks for deleted or merged content.
- Permanent and server-side. Use 301 or 308 redirects; Google says permanent redirects don’t cause a loss in PageRank.
- Kept. Google recommends at least a year so every signal moves; we never remove ours, because other sites keep linking to old addresses for years.
- Internal links updated to the new addresses, so visitors and crawlers don't pass through redirects at all.
- The pages SaaS sites tend to rename: product and feature pages, integrations, comparison pages, customer stories, and links to docs and the changelog in the footer.
| Platform | Where redirects live | In bulk |
|---|---|---|
| Webflow | Site settings → Publishing → 301 redirects; changing a page slug can add one automatically | CSV import and export |
| Framer | Site Settings → Redirects | The Redirect Sync plugin exports and imports them |
| Astro on Cloudflare | A _redirects file in the project | Up to 2,000 static and 100 dynamic rules per file |
| Shopify | Content → Menus → URL redirects | CSV import; a redirect works only when the old URL returns 404 |
Checked 12 November 2026 in each platform's help pages.
What should you carry over to the new pages?
Everything that tells Google what a page is about and why it deserves to rank: the answers to its queries, its title and H1, the internal links pointing to it, its structured data and its media. A redesign can change how all of that looks. It shouldn't quietly remove it.
| Element | Carry over | Common mistake |
|---|---|---|
| Body text | The paragraphs that answer the page's top queries, as HTML text | Cutting them for a cleaner layout, or moving them into images or a video |
| Title and meta description | The current ones, unless changed on purpose and noted | Rewriting every title in the new brand voice |
| H1 and headings | The phrases people search for, in the H1 and section headings | Replacing them with slogans |
| Internal links | Menu, footer, related-content and in-text links to the page | A smaller menu that drops pages nobody links to anywhere else |
| Structured data | Organization, Product or SoftwareApplication, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList, Article | New templates built without it |
| Images and files | Image URLs or redirects, alt text, PDFs that get links | New file names and no redirects |
| Canonical and hreflang | A self-referencing canonical on every new URL; language annotations updated | Canonicals pointing at staging or at old URLs |
The quietest loss is the shorter page. The brief asks for less text, the designer delivers a cleaner page, and the section that answered three long-tail questions is gone. Before you approve a template, open the page's top 10 queries in Search Console and find the answer to each one on the new design. If an answer is missing, add it back in a form that fits the layout: a short section, an FAQ or a table.
What should you test on staging before launch?
Run the same crawl on staging that you ran on the old site and compare the two URL by URL. Keep staging out of search with a password or an IP allowlist rather than only a noindex tag, which can slip through to production.
- Every old URL returns 200 (kept) or one 301 to a live page (moved)
- Retired URLs return 404 or 410
- No chains, no loops
- robots.txt for production written and checked
- No noindex left on any template
- A self-referencing canonical on every page
- A new XML sitemap that lists only live URLs
- Titles, H1s and descriptions match the plan
- The main text and links are in the raw HTML, not only after scripts run
- Internal links per page about the same as before, or more
- Core Web Vitals on the main templates as good as before, or better
- Analytics, tag manager and conversion events firing
- Forms deliver leads where they should
The raw-HTML check matters more than it used to. Google renders JavaScript, but Vercel found that the ChatGPT and Claude crawlers fetch JavaScript files without executing them. If the new templates build their text in the browser, those crawlers see a page without it.
What do you do on launch day, and in what order?
Switch on the new site and the redirects together, remove anything left from staging, confirm every old URL resolves, and tell search engines about the new URLs. Pick a day with lower traffic if your traffic is seasonal, as Google suggests, and not the day before a campaign or a holiday.
- Switch the redirects on with the new site, not after it.
- Check robots.txt and remove any noindex that came from staging.
- Crawl the old URL list against production: every URL returns 200 or one 301.
- Submit the new sitemap in Search Console, and keep the old one submitted for a few weeks to watch the old URLs drop out.
- Inspect the 10 to 20 most important URLs with the URL Inspection tool and request indexing.
- Notify Bing through IndexNow or submit the sitemap in Bing Webmaster Tools.
- Click through forms, demo booking and checkout on production, and confirm analytics records them.
- Update the links you control: ads, email signatures, social profiles, review sites, docs and in-app links.
What should you watch in the first 90 days?
Expect some movement in the first few weeks while Google recrawls, and judge the redesign on trends by page rather than on daily totals. Google says a small to medium site can take a few weeks for most pages to move to new URLs, and larger sites take longer.
| When | Check | Investigate if |
|---|---|---|
| Days 1–3 | The new sitemap in Search Console, 404s in the Pages report, server errors | An important URL returns 404 or 5xx, or indexed pages fall sharply |
| Weeks 1–2 | Impressions and clicks for your top 20 pages against the baseline | A page that kept its URL loses most of its impressions for a week |
| Weeks 3–6 | Queries per page: which ones each new page ranks for | A page's main queries move to a different URL, or to nobody |
| Weeks 6–12 | Organic sessions and conversions against the same weeks before, and the redesign's own metric | Totals stay down for several weeks and it isn't seasonal |
When a page loses its rankings after a redesign, the cause is almost always one from the first table: a missing or wrong redirect, an answer that was cut, a lost internal link, or a noindex. Fix the cause, request indexing for the page, and give it a few weeks.
What happened when we redesigned dixi.agency?
We switched dixi.agency to a redesigned site on a new platform, from Framer to Astro, on 29 October 2026. We kept the domain, and each of the 32 old URLs that changed got one 301 to its closest new page. In the 13 days after the switch, Search Console counted 121 clicks and 3,057 impressions, against 3 clicks and 378 impressions in the 12 days before.
| dixi.agency | 12 days before (17–28 Oct) | 13 days after (29 Oct – 10 Nov) |
|---|---|---|
| Clicks from Google | 3 | 121 |
| Impressions | 378, about 32 a day | 3,057, about 235 a day |
| Average position | 14.0 | 16.2, across many more queries |
| Mobile PageSpeed (lab) | 62, on 27 Oct | 96, on 3 Nov |
| Largest Contentful Paint, mobile | 5.7 s | 1.3 s |
Search Console for dixi.agency, all queries, web search, pulled 12 November 2026; PageSpeed Insights lab tests on the live domain.
Two honest caveats. We published new service pages and articles in the same weeks, so the growth isn't the redesign alone; what the numbers show is that the switch didn't cost us traffic. And the average position got slightly worse because the site started appearing for many more queries, most of them new and far down the results. The 32 old URLs were the Framer site's /en/ and /uk-ua/ copies, old blog posts and a few renamed pages, each with one rule in our _redirects file. More on the move itself is on Framer to Astro.
Does a redesign affect AI search visibility?
Yes, in the same ways it affects Google, plus one more. AI answers cite pages by URL and quote their text, so a broken redirect or a cut paragraph can take you out of those answers too. The extra risk is rendering: crawlers that don't run JavaScript only see what is in the HTML.
Keep the facts buyers ask assistants about, such as what you sell, for whom, the price, integrations and security, as plain text on the pages where they have always been, and update llms.txt and the sitemap with the new URLs. The rest is in our playbook, how to get your B2B site recommended by ChatGPT.
The checklist on one page
Four phases, in order. Each item has a reason in the sections above.
- Export pages, queries and links from Search Console
- Crawl the site: status, titles, H1s, canonicals, internal links, schema
- Record conversions per landing page and a 4 to 8 week baseline
- Decide: keep the domain; keep URLs wherever possible
- Redirect map: keep, 301 to the closest page, or 404/410, with a reason for each
- Top queries per page answered on each new template
- Titles, H1s, structured data and internal links carried over
- Main text and links in the raw HTML
- Staging behind a password
- Redirects live with the new site
- robots.txt checked, no noindex
- Old URL list crawled on production
- New sitemap submitted, old one kept for a few weeks
- Top URLs inspected; Bing notified
- Forms, booking, checkout and analytics tested
- 404s and server errors daily for the first days
- Top pages against the baseline every week
- Queries per page from week 3
- Conversions and the redesign's own metric at weeks 6 to 12
- Redirects kept for good
If you would rather have a team run this for you, it is how we run every website redesign. If the design is fine and only the platform needs to change, see website migration.
FAQ
Does a website redesign affect SEO?
It can, in both directions. A redesign that keeps the URLs, the content that answers each page's queries, the internal links and the structured data usually keeps its rankings and can gain from faster, clearer pages. One that changes URLs without redirects, cuts content or ships a staging noindex can lose traffic within days.
How long does it take to recover rankings after a redesign?
On the same domain with the URLs kept, there is often nothing to recover beyond a few weeks of movement while Google recrawls. Google says a small to medium site can take a few weeks for most pages to move to new URLs, and larger sites longer. Domain changes are much slower: in a study of 892 domain migrations, traffic took 523 days on average to return, and 17% hadn't returned after 1,000 days.
Should I keep the same URLs when redesigning?
Yes, wherever you can. A URL that keeps its address keeps its rankings and links without depending on a redirect. Change a URL only when the old one is genuinely wrong for the new structure, and then give it one permanent redirect to its closest new page.
Can I redirect all old pages to the homepage?
No. Send each old URL to the page that replaces it. If nothing replaces it, let it return 404 or 410, which is what Google's site-move guide asks for deleted or merged content. A homepage redirect doesn't answer the query the old page ranked for.
How long should I keep 301 redirects after a redesign?
Google recommends at least a year so every signal moves to the new URLs, and keeping them indefinitely from the users' side. We never remove ours: links from other sites, bookmarks and old emails keep sending people to old addresses for years.
Is it safe to redesign and change platforms at the same time?
It is when the domain and the URLs stay the same, because nothing a search engine relies on has to move. Google's advice is to change one thing at a time, so if the domain or the URL structure must change too, do that as a separate step.
Do I need the Change of Address tool for a redesign?
Only if the domain or subdomain changes, for example from example.com to example.net. Google says you don't need it for HTTP to HTTPS, www to non-www, or path changes within the same domain.
What should I do if traffic dropped after a redesign?
Compare the pages that lost the most impressions with your pre-launch inventory, page by page. Check that each old URL returns 200 or one 301 to a live page, that the content answering its queries is still there, that its internal links survived, and that no noindex or robots.txt rule blocks it. Fix the cause, request indexing in Search Console and give it a few weeks.
Sources
- How to move a site · Google Search Central, last updated 20 Aug 2026
- Redirects and Google Search · Google Search Central
- How long should an SEO migration take? [Study updated] · Dan Taylor, Search Engine Journal, 9 Jan 2025
- The rise of the AI crawler · Vercel, Dec 2024
- How do I set up redirects in Webflow? · Webflow Help
- How to set up redirects to maintain SEO ranking · Framer Help
- Workers limits, static assets and _redirects · Cloudflare Docs
- Creating and managing URL redirects · Shopify Help Center
- SEO Spider, free version up to 500 URLs · Screaming Frog
- Search Console and PageSpeed Insights data for dixi.agency · DIXI, 27 Oct – 12 Nov 2026
