Most redesigns that lose traffic lose it on one day, for one reason: nobody wrote the redirect map.
Before you design anything
- Export every indexed URL from Search Console and your analytics
- Rank them by traffic and by conversions, and mark the top fifty as protected
- Record current organic sessions, conversion rate and Core Web Vitals as a benchmark
- Note which pages have external links pointing at them, because those are the ones that hurt most if they break
This takes an afternoon and it is the difference between a redesign you can evaluate and one you can only argue about.
The redirect map
One spreadsheet: every old URL in the left column, the new URL it should send a visitor to in the right. No blanks. Anything that genuinely has no equivalent goes to the closest relevant page, not to the homepage.
Redirecting everything to the homepage is treated as a soft error and it throws away the value of the old page entirely. It is also the single most common shortcut taken on launch night.
Test the map on staging before launch, not after. The scope of this work is in our redesign service.
The week before launch
- Confirm the staging site is blocked from indexing, and that the live site will not be
- Check metadata carried across, including titles and descriptions for the protected pages
- Verify internal links point at new URLs rather than through redirects
- Test every form on a real phone, and confirm the email actually arrives
- Confirm analytics and conversion tracking fire on the new templates
- Have a rollback plan you have actually tested
The month after
Watch crawl errors and index coverage daily for the first fortnight. A spike in 404s means the map has gaps; fix them the same day.
Expect a dip. Search engines have to recrawl and reassess, and positions wobble while they do. Done properly it recovers within two to six weeks. If it has not recovered after two months, something is wrong and it is fixable, but only if someone is watching.