Rebuilding your site without losing rankings: the SEO checklist

The new site is beautiful, fast and finally done properly. Then, after launch, Google traffic collapses. It is a scenario that happens more often than you would think, and almost always because of avoidable mistakes: changed addresses, vanished pages, a block left on by mistake.

In this guide you will find a checklist for rebuilding or changing a site without losing rankings, divided into three moments: before, during and after.

Before starting: understand what you have

Before touching anything, photograph the situation.

• A list of all addresses of the current site (pages, articles, products, important images). It can be obtained from the sitemap, from a scan with a crawling tool and from Search Console data.
• Pages that bring traffic and enquiries: they are the ones to protect most. Look at statistics and Search Console to see which visits and searches arrive.
• Pages with links from other sites: they are worth a lot, and losing them costs.
• Starting data: positions, visits, conversions and speed, to compare after launch.
• Current structure: titles, descriptions, heading structure, internal links, structured data.

Deciding what to keep, change and remove

Not everything needs to be kept, but everything needs to be decided. For each page:

• Keep (same address, updated content).
• Move (new address, with redirect).
• Merge with another (redirected to the page that replaces it).
• Delete (only if it has no value, and with a correct response).

A useful principle: do not remove content that brings traffic just because it "does not fit the new design". Better to adapt the design.

The redirect map

It is the heart of the migration. Every old address that changes must lead to the new one with a permanent redirect (301).

• A one-to-one map, old address → new address most similar in content.
• No chains: A goes to B which goes to C. Better A straight to C.
• Avoid sending everything to the home page: Google treats it as an error, and the user is disoriented.
• Keep redirects in place over time, for at least a year, often longer.

What to keep in the new site

To avoid losing what Google has already understood about your site:

• Titles and descriptions of the pages that already rank, unless there are reasoned improvements.
• Text and heading structure, updating them but without upending them.
• Internal links consistent, with descriptive text.
• Structured data present and correct (I talk about it in Structured data: what it is and how it helps your site).
• Alternative text for images and sensible file names.
• Multilingual versions with correct mutual links.

Testing before publishing

The new site must be tried in a test environment, not the live one.

• The test environment must not be indexed: access for search engines is blocked during testing. And then, and it is the classic mistake, it has to be removed at launch: a forgotten block makes the site disappear from Google.
• Check every redirect with a tool: every old address must lead to the right page with a 301 response.
• Check speed on mobile and the main metrics; I talk about it in Core Web Vitals.
• Try forms, payments and features.
• Check robots, sitemap and canonical (the "official" addresses of pages).
• Verify tracking: statistics and conversions must work from day one.

Launch day

• Choose a quiet moment, not in the peak of a campaign.
• Publish with a rollback plan: a copy of the old site ready to come back if needed.
• Turn on the redirects together with the new site.
• Remove the block to search engines, if there was one.
• Submit the new sitemap to Search Console.
• Check at once the main pages, from several devices.

After launch: the checks of the first weeks

The migration does not end at launch.

• Search Console every day in the first weeks: crawl errors, excluded pages, warnings.
• 404 errors: look for old addresses without a redirect and fix.
• Indexing: check that the new pages appear.
• Positions and traffic, compared with the starting data.
• Links from other sites to the old addresses: if important, ask for them to be updated.
• Real speed for visitors, which updates over the weeks.

Some fluctuation in the first weeks is normal. What counts is whether, after a reasonable period, the data return to the previous level or improve.

If you also change domain

Changing domain adds complexity. You need:

• redirects from every old page to the new one, on the new domain;
• notification of the change in Search Console;
• keeping the old domain for a long time;
• updating all profiles and links (social, local listings, email).

If you can, avoid changing domain, structure and design together: the more variables change, the harder it is to understand what went wrong.

The mistakes that cost the most

• Changing addresses without redirects.
• Leaving the block to search engines after launch.
• Deleting pages that bring traffic.
• Redirecting everything to the home page.
• Not measuring beforehand, and so not knowing what changed afterwards.
• Rewriting titles and text without criteria, losing what worked.
• Forgetting mobile, speed and structured data.

If you are asking yourself whether to rebuild the site or fix it, also read When it is worth rebuilding your site.

Why entrust it to me

I have been programming since 1999, with more than 300 projects delivered and about 30 agencies as an external developer. When I rebuild a site I start from an analysis of what is there and what brings visibility, prepare the redirect map, test everything in a test environment and measure again after launch, so we compare before and after. I work from Rome and remotely, with online previews every week.

If you are about to rebuild your site and want to protect what you have earned on Google, write to me: a chat of about 20 minutes, no strings attached, then a written, free proposal. The service is in Technical SEO and site speed.