Guide
Most businesses lose search traffic during a redesign for boring, avoidable reasons: missing redirects, replaced metadata, a staging robots rule left switched on. Work through this checklist and your rebuild keeps everything you already earned.
Export a full list of your current URLs from your analytics, your sitemap and a crawl of the live site. That list is the contract your new site has to honour.
Mark the pages that already bring in traffic or enquiries. Those are the ones that must keep their URL, their headline and the substance of their content. Everything else can be merged, rewritten or dropped on purpose rather than by accident.
Every old URL that changes needs a permanent 301 redirect to the single closest matching new page. Not the home page — the closest match. Bulk-redirecting a whole site to the home page is the single fastest way to lose rankings during a rebuild.
Avoid redirect chains (old → interim → new). Point the old URL straight at the final destination, and keep the redirect map live for at least a year.
Page titles, meta descriptions, H1s and image alt text are part of why a page ranks. Copy the ones that are already working, then improve them — don't let a fresh build silently replace them with template defaults.
Check that every page has one H1, a unique title under about 60 characters and a description under about 160.
It is tempting to cut long pages down for a cleaner look. Search engines rank the answer, not the whitespace. If a page ranks because it answers a question thoroughly, keep that answer on the new page.
Where you merge two pages into one, make sure the merged page covers both topics properly and both old URLs redirect to it.
Every page should have a canonical tag pointing at itself. A canonical left pointing at the home page tells search engines the page is a duplicate.
Publish a fresh sitemap.xml listing only live, indexable URLs, reference it from robots.txt, and make sure the staging site's Disallow: / rule never ships to production. That one leftover line has taken more rebuilt sites out of search than anything else on this list.
Speed is both a ranking factor and the reason people stay. Compress images, set explicit width and height, load the hero image eagerly and everything below the fold lazily, and keep fonts to two families with a system fallback while they load.
Submit the new sitemap in Google Search Console, then check the coverage and 404 reports weekly. A small dip in the first fortnight is normal; a sustained drop means a redirect, a canonical or a robots rule is wrong.
Keep the old analytics profile running so you can compare like for like rather than guessing.
RebuildWebsites handles the redirects, metadata and post-launch checks as part of every rebuild. See what's included in the rebuild options.