Establish why you are redesigning
"It looks dated" is a weak brief and produces a project measured on taste. A redesign justified by something specific — conversion, mobile experience, an unmanageable content structure — has a test it can be held to.
It also determines scope. Many stated redesign goals turn out to need content and structure work rather than a new visual design.
Benchmark before you change anything
Record current traffic by page, rankings for the terms that matter, conversion rates, and the pages that actually earn revenue or leads.
Without this you cannot distinguish a successful launch from a damaging one, and arguments about the outcome become arguments about impressions.
Inventory every URL
This is the step that prevents the traffic loss, and it is the one most often rushed. Export every existing URL, including old campaign pages and anything with inbound links.
- For each URL: keep, redirect to a specific equivalent, or intentionally remove
- Never redirect wholesale to the homepage — that is treated as a soft error
- Preserve the URL where the page survives; changing it discards accumulated value for no gain
- Keep the redirect map in version control, not in someone's spreadsheet
- Test every redirect on staging before launch, automatically
Do not discard content that works
Redesigns frequently shorten pages for visual reasons, removing the content that was ranking. The new page looks better and performs worse.
Identify the pages driving traffic and treat their content as a constraint on the design rather than material to be trimmed to fit it.
Carry the technical foundations across
Titles and descriptions, structured data, canonical tags, sitemaps, and internal linking all need to be rebuilt deliberately. They are easy to omit because nothing visibly breaks when they are missing.
Check performance and accessibility before launch too — a redesign that is slower than what it replaced will lose on both experience and ranking.
Watch the first two weeks closely
Monitor crawl errors, redirect failures, indexing, and traffic daily immediately after launch. Most redesign damage is recoverable if caught within days and much harder after a month.
Expect a modest short-term dip as search engines recrawl. A sustained drop across the site is a problem, not a settling-in period.