Rebuilding your website without losing your search rankings

Why rebuilds lose traffic

• URLs change, and the old addresses lead nowhere.
• Pages that ranked are removed, merged or rewritten beyond recognition.
• Page titles and descriptions are not carried over.
• Settings that kept the test site out of search engines are still switched on at launch.
• The new site is slower than the old one.
• Links between pages are lost in the new structure.

Every one of these is avoidable, and most are a matter of bookkeeping more than engineering.

Before you build: take an inventory

List every page on the current site. A crawl of the site or an export from your content system will give you the full set of addresses.

Then find out which pages matter. Google Search Console shows which pages receive clicks and for which searches. Mark those, along with any pages other websites link to. These are the pages the rebuild must protect.

During the build: keep what works

• Keep the same URL wherever you can. An address that does not change cannot lose its ranking to a missing redirect.
• Where a URL must change, write down the old address and the new one, page by page.
• On pages that rank, carry over the title, the headings and the substance of the text.
• Bring across structured data, canonical tags and the sitemap.
• Make sure the new pages are at least as fast as the old ones.

Improving a page that ranks is fine. Replacing it with something about a different subject is how rankings disappear.

Launch day checklist

• Permanent redirects are in place for every old URL, and each one has been tested.
• Anything that hid the test site from search engines has been removed.
• Canonical addresses point to the live domain, not the test one.
• The site answers on one address only, with the others redirecting to it.
• The new sitemap has been submitted in Search Console.
• Analytics is installed and the forms have been tested.

After launch: watch and fix

For the first weeks, look at Search Console regularly. The pages report lists addresses that return not found, and each of those needs a redirect. The performance report shows whether clicks and positions are holding.

Some movement in the first few weeks is normal while search engines re-read the site. A steady fall on pages that used to perform is not, and it usually traces back to a missing redirect or missing content.

A note on changing domain

Moving to a new domain at the same time as rebuilding the site doubles the number of things that change at once, which makes any drop harder to diagnose. If you can, do them separately.

If the domain must change, redirect every old address to the same page on the new domain, and use the change of address tool in Search Console to tell Google about the move.