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Most Website Redesigns Go Wrong in the Move, Not the Design. Here's How to Keep Your Google Rankings.

Most owners decide it's time for a new website for the right reasons. It looks dated. It's painful on a phone. Nobody can update it because the person who built it moved on. All fair. What nobody mentions is that the riskiest part of a redesign isn't the design. It's the day you switch from the old site to the new one.

I've seen a good-looking new site launch and the phone go quiet for a month. Nothing was wrong with the new pages. Google just couldn't find the old ones anymore, and the contact form had been sending to an inbox nobody checked.

First, is it actually time?

A few honest signs: the site is hard to use on a phone, you can't change a phone number without calling someone, and it doesn't have a page for each service you actually sell. That last one matters more than people think. If you do roofing, gutters and siding but have one page that says "Services," there's nothing for Google to match when someone searches "gutter replacement" in your town.

The phone point isn't just about convenience either. Google uses the mobile version of a site's content for indexing and ranking.[1] If your site is rough on a phone, that rough version is the one Google is grading.

What goes wrong in the move

Old pages disappear. Your current site has addresses Google already knows, like /roof-replacement or /about-us.html. The new site has different ones. Unless every old address is pointed at its new home, Google finds a dead end where your ranking page used to be. Links from other sites, your Google Business Profile, and old emails all hit the same dead end.

The forms break. Contact and quote forms are usually the last thing anyone tests. They get wired to a developer's test inbox, or to an address that was retired years ago. The site looks fine. Leads just stop arriving.

Email goes down. Your website and your email share a domain, and they're controlled by different records in the same DNS settings. Someone pointing the domain at the new site deletes or overwrites the mail records along the way, and now nobody can email you. This one shows up fast, at least.

What Google says to do

Google publishes guidance for exactly this. The short version: make a list of every old URL, decide where each one should go, and set up permanent server-side redirects (301 or 308) from the old addresses to the new ones.[2] Keep those redirects in place for as long as possible, generally at least a year.[2] And expect some temporary movement in your rankings while Google catches up.[2] Temporary is the key word. A move done carefully settles. A move done carelessly just loses traffic.

One thing I'd add from experience: don't redirect every old page to the homepage. It's the lazy version, and it throws away the specific page Google was ranking. A roof replacement page should land on the new roof replacement page.

The checklist

This is what we run through on every redesign, and you can hold any web person to it:

• Export every URL on the current site before anything changes.
• Map each old URL to its closest new page, and set up a permanent redirect for each one.
• Write down your current DNS records first. Change only the records the website needs. Leave the mail records (MX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC) alone.
• Send a real test through every form after launch and confirm it lands where the office will see it.
• Keep the old site available until the new one is confirmed working.
• Submit the new sitemap in Google Search Console and watch the new pages get indexed over the following weeks.

None of that is glamorous. It's also the difference between a redesign that brings in more calls and one you regret.

See it before you commit

The other thing I'd push for: see the new homepage before you sign anything. A mockup built from your real business and your real content tells you more than any portfolio. If it isn't clearly better than what you have, you've lost nothing.