Website · SEO

Redesign your site without losing your rankings

New design, new menu, new addresses… If you do not tell Google where the old pages went, search traffic built up over years can drop to zero on launch day. The thing that prevents it is called a 301 redirect.

Reading time: ~6 minGuide

When a company website is redesigned, the design gets most of the attention and the old addresses get the least. Yet most of the traffic lost in a new site’s first week comes not from the design but from pages that moved without being redirected.

This article explains what breaks when addresses change in a redesign, how a 301 redirect fixes it, and the steps to finish before launch day.

The problem

What breaks when an address changes?

On the new site the “Our Services” page may now live at /services. But Google, your customers and the sites linking to you still know the old address. When the old address leads nowhere, four things happen at once:

404 errors

Visitors arriving from search results or bookmarks land on “page not found” and usually leave.

Lost rankings

The search visibility the old page earned over the years does not move to the new address by itself.

Broken shares

Links in brochures, e-mail signatures and social media no longer go anywhere.

Wasted backlinks

Links from other sites are your site’s most valuable SEO asset; without a redirect their value is lost.

Definition

What is a 301 redirect, and how is it different from a 302?

A 301 is the server telling the browser and the search engine “this page has moved permanently to this address”. Visitors move to the new address without noticing, and over time Google drops the old address from its index, shows the new one and passes the old page’s signals on to it.

A 302 means “temporarily elsewhere”: right for a maintenance page or a short campaign. In a redesign the addresses change for good, so the right choice is a 301.

Right: the old address goes to the new one in one step /our-services 301 /services Avoid: a redirect chain /service.php /our-services /services Every extra hop slows the page; the longer the chain, the likelier a search engine stops following it
Figure 1 — Redirect the old address straight to the final one; do not route it through intermediate addresses.
301

permanent move:
the right code for a redesign

1

hop: old address
straight to the final one

1 yr+

how long to keep
redirects live

Step by step

6 steps to finish before launch

Redirects are not clean-up work for after launch; they are part of the new site. Work in this order:

01

Take an inventory of the old addresses

Download the current site’s sitemap and add the most-clicked pages in Search Console and the pages that receive links from other sites. An address that is not on the list cannot be redirected.

02

Build an old → new mapping table

Next to every old address, write the new page whose content is closest. Send pages without a counterpart to the nearest parent page on the same topic, not to the homepage; sending everything to the homepage looks the same to Google as “page gone”.

03

Make every redirect a single step

The old address should go straight to the final one. Update redirects left over from a previous redesign too, so no chain forms (see Figure 1).

04

Map each language separately

On multilingual sites every language version, such as /en/about-us, should go to the new page in its own language; do not funnel them all into one language.

05

Update internal links and the sitemap

Menus, footers and in-text links should not point to old addresses; a redirect is a safety net, not a permanent address. Submit the new sitemap to Search Console.

06

Watch for 404s after launch

In the first weeks, follow the “not found” report in Search Console and the site’s own 404 log, and add any addresses you missed to the table.

“The redirect table matters as much as the design: the design welcomes the visitor, the redirect brings them to the door.”
Checklist

Launch-day checklist

Tick these off one by one right before and right after the new site goes live:

  • The 20 highest-traffic old addresses open the right new page in a browser.
  • Redirects return 301, not 302.
  • No redirect goes through more than one hop.
  • Every language version goes to the page in its own language.
  • No menu or footer link still points to an old address.
  • The new sitemap has been submitted to Search Console.
In Falcon CMS

How much of this happens by itself?

In Falcon CMS, when you change the address of a page or post, the old address is automatically redirected to the new one with a 301, separately for each language. That covers changes made within the site.

For old addresses coming from another system you add manual redirects in the panel, and the sitemap, hreflang and canonical tags are generated for the new addresses automatically. Building the mapping table is still a job for someone who knows your site; in our setup service we do it together with you.

Let’s redesign your site without losing traffic

New design, mapping of the old addresses and follow-up after launch: let’s build your company website on Falcon CMS together.

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