Article 1 min read

Website Migration: How to Redesign Without Losing Rankings

Redesigning or migrating your website is one of the riskiest things you can do for SEO. Done wrong, you can lose years of accumulated rankings overnight. Here's how to do it safely.

Before the migration

Crawl your current site and document every URL
Record current rankings for important keywords
Export your backlink profile
Map every old URL to its new equivalent
Prepare 301 redirects for every page that changes URL
During the migration
Implement all 301 redirects before launching
Verify all internal links point to new URLs
Update your XML sitemap with new URLs
Submit the new sitemap to Google Search Console
Keep the old sitemap available for 30 days

After the migration

Monitor Search Console daily for the first month. Watch for crawl errors, ranking drops, and indexing issues. Fix problems immediately, the longer they persist, the more damage they do.