Website Redesign SEO Checklist: Keep Your Rankings While Changing Everything

The most expensive part of a redesign is invisible: the rankings you lose when URLs change and nobody maps the old ones to the new. We redesign websites for a living — this is the checklist we run on every project, including our own site.

Before touching anything

• Inventory every URL that gets traffic. Search Console → Pages → export. These URLs are assets. Anything with impressions gets an explicit plan: keep, redirect, or consciously drop.
• Record current rankings and Core Web Vitals. You can’t prove the redesign helped (or catch it hurting) without a baseline.
• Save every title tag and meta description that works. If a page ranks, its metadata is part of why.

During the build

• 301-redirect every old URL to its closest new equivalent. Not to the homepage — to the equivalent. A redirect map is thirty minutes of work that protects years of authority.
• One H1 per page, and make it mean something. Your headline is a ranking signal; “Welcome” is not a headline.
• Every page gets a unique title and description. Sites exported from builders often ship one template title across the site. Google notices; so should you.
• Canonical tags must point at URLs that actually resolve — final destination, correct protocol, no redirect chains. (We audited a beautiful agency site recently whose canonicals pointed at a www domain that redirected away. Polish means nothing if the plumbing leaks.)
• Absolute URLs for social images. Relative og:image paths fail silently in most scrapers — your links just look broken on LinkedIn and no one tells you.
• Structured data where it’s true. Organization, Article, Breadcrumb schema — honest markup that matches the visible page, nothing more.

Before launch

• Crawl the staging site (Screaming Frog or similar): broken links, orphan pages, missing metadata, redirect loops.
• Test Core Web Vitals on a real phone on throttled connection. Lab scores flatter; field data ranks.
• Ship a clean sitemap and robots.txt on day one, and submit the sitemap in Search Console the same hour the site goes live.

After launch

Watch Search Console daily for two weeks. Crawl errors and dropped pages show up there before they show up in revenue. Small ranking wobble is normal for a few weeks; cliffs are not — a cliff means a missing redirect.

Redesigning and don’t want to gamble your traffic on it? That’s literally our job — see how we build in our works.