Before you touch the design
Capture the current state so you can compare later:
- Export your top pages by traffic from Search Console and Analytics
- Save a full list of current URLs
- Record current titles and meta descriptions
- Note which pages have inbound links from other sites
- Baseline your Core Web Vitals and mobile scores
Decide what's actually broken
Redesign the pages that carry the business: home and your top services. A page with steady traffic and conversions may need a speed fix rather than a rebuild. This is why per-page pricing beats a full-site rebuild for most businesses.
Protect your URLs
Keep every URL you can. Where a URL must change, add a 301 redirect from old to new — one hop, no chains. Never redirect everything to the homepage; that tells search engines the old page's content is gone.
Carry the content across
Ranking pages rank because of their content. If you cut 800 words down to a stylish 80, expect to lose the rankings with them. Restructure and tighten, but keep the substance and the headings that match real searches.
Launch-day checks
Before you announce anything:
- Every page has a unique title and meta description
- Redirects tested from a list of old URLs
- Sitemap regenerated and submitted
- robots.txt isn't blocking the site (staging blocks get shipped constantly)
- Forms tested end to end, with the confirmation email received
- Analytics and conversion events firing
- Mobile checked on a real phone, not just a narrow browser window
The two weeks after
Watch Search Console coverage for new 404s and crawl errors, compare traffic to your saved baseline, and fix anything that surfaces quickly. Small ranking movement in the first fortnight is normal; a sustained drop means a redirect or content problem worth chasing down.
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