Website Relaunch Without Losing Rankings: 7 Steps

Why a relaunch can cost you Google rankings

Google knows your website through its URLs. Over the years, every subpage, such as your-company.com/services/bathroom-renovation, has collected links, clicks and trust. If you rebuild the site and the URLs change, visitors and Googlebot land on an error page. Whatever value the old URL had gathered does not carry over to the new one.

This happens more often than you would think: a new system names pages differently, /contact.html becomes /contact, three service pages become one. To you everything looks better, but to Google it is a new website with lots of missing pages. The good news: redirects can fully absorb this. According to Google, permanent redirects have no negative effect on PageRank, the value a page receives through links.

A relaunch is almost always worth it anyway. If most of your visitors come on their phone and the old site only shows up shrunken down there, you are losing enquiries regardless. So the question is not whether you renew, but how you do it so that Google follows along.

The checklist: 7 steps for a clean relaunch

The steps follow the official Google Search Central guide to moving websites, adapted to the situation of a small business with 5 to 50 subpages.

1. Secure the old URLs

   Create a list of all URLs of the old website. Sources are the old sitemap, Search Console and your website system. Do not forget PDFs and images, they can bring in visitors too.

2. Map the new URLs

   Next to each old URL, write the new page with the matching content. The old service page becomes the new service page, not simply the homepage.

3. Prepare the new site

   Every new page points to itself with the canonical tag. Internal links point directly to the new URLs. Any block via noindex or robots.txt left over from the test phase has to go before launch.

4. Set up redirects

   Redirect every old URL on the server side and permanently (301 or 308) to its new URL. Pages that no longer exist return status 404 or 410.

5. Test the redirects

   Open the most important old URLs by hand. Each one must land on the right new page in a single step, without a detour through a second redirect.

6. Submit the sitemap

   Submit the new sitemap in Google Search Console. This helps Google get to know the new URLs faster.

7. Monitor in the weeks after

   Check Search Console for errors of the type Not found, and compare clicks and queries with the time before the relaunch.

Which redirect is the right one?

Redirects differ by a three-digit number, the status code. For a relaunch you almost only need the permanent ones. Google explicitly recommends server-side, permanent redirects such as 301 and 308 whenever they are technically possible. A redirect via JavaScript in the browser is only the last resort.

It is also important that redirects are not chained one after another. Googlebot does follow up to 10 redirects in a chain, but Google recommends redirecting straight to the final destination. Every intermediate stop costs visitors loading time. A typical case: the old site first redirects from http to https and then once more to the new URL. A single rule that arrives at the destination immediately is better.

What happens after launch

After launch, Google crawls your website more intensively than usual for a while, because all requests to the old URLs end up at the new ones. Rankings may fluctuate during this time. Google says that for small to medium-sized websites it usually takes a few weeks until most pages have moved. That is normal and no reason to panic.

In Search Console you can see the number of indexed pages fall under the old sitemap and rise under the new one. According to Google, warnings about redirects in the old sitemap are normal during this phase. Do watch out for new errors of the type Not found, though: they almost always point to a forgotten or incorrectly set redirect.

Keep the redirects afterwards for as long as possible, at least a year according to Google. During this time Google transfers all signals to the new URLs, including links from other websites. At the same time, update the links you control yourself: your Google Business Profile, social media profiles, business directories and your email signature.

What this means for small businesses

For a website with a handful of pages, the effort is manageable. The list of URLs usually fits on one page, and common website systems offer a setting for redirects. A relaunch only gets expensive when this step is forgotten and enquiries from Google collapse. What a new website costs overall is covered in our guides.

• List of all old URLs is ready
• Every URL has a matching new destination
• Redirects are permanent (301 or 308) and direct
• noindex and robots.txt blocks from the test phase are removed
• New sitemap is submitted in Search Console
• Profiles and listings on other sites point to the new URLs