A relaunch is the single moment when a website can lose the most visibility. Not because the new site is worse, but because things break during the move that had quietly worked for years: URLs change, copy gets cut, a forgotten setting locks Google out. We have seen relaunches where the owner only noticed weeks later that enquiries had dried up. All of it is preventable if you take the right steps in the right order.

Why rankings get lost during a relaunch

Google does not rank a website as a whole; it ranks individual URLs. Each page has built up its position over years, supported by its content and by links pointing to exactly that address from elsewhere. If the address changes during the relaunch and nobody sets up a redirect, Google stands in front of a door that leads nowhere. The old page drops out of the index, and the new one starts from zero. How quickly addresses die on the web has been measured by the Pew Research Center (2024): 38 percent of webpages that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible ten years later. Relaunches without redirects contribute their share to that number.

The second common mistake is about content. Relaunches invite tidying up: old copy feels dated, so it gets shortened or deleted. Yet that copy was often exactly what brought visitors in. Replace the page with the detailed service description with three sleek slogans, and you end up with a prettier site and fewer visitors.

Before the relaunch: take stock

Before anything new gets built, you need a complete picture of the old site. It takes about an hour and is the cheapest insurance the project will ever get.

Collect every URL of the old site, with a crawler (Screaming Frog, for example) or, failing that, from the sitemap
Check Google Search Console for the pages that actually earn clicks, and export the list
Note pages with external links: who links to which subpage from outside?
Document existing redirects, so old and new rules don’t stack into redirect chains

The redirect map: the heart of the project

From that inventory comes a plain table: old URL on the left, new URL on the right. Every old address that has visitors or links gets a 301 redirect to the new page that matches it best in content. Not a blanket redirect to the homepage; Google treats that much like an error. Someone who would have landed on /services/web-design wants to arrive on the new web design page, not on the front door.

For pages that genuinely won’t exist anymore and have no replacement, a clean 404 or 410 is fine. What matters is that this is a deliberate decision, not an oversight. And leave the redirects in place afterwards: Google’s own documentation on site moves recommends keeping them active for at least one year, so that all signals transfer to the new addresses.

Content: keep what works

The Search Console data from your inventory shows which pages and search terms bring visitors. That content belongs on the new site — reworked and better structured if you like, but not deleted without replacement. Also check the details that slip through during a design process: heading structure, page titles, and meta descriptions of the important pages should be set deliberately rather than left to chance.

A relaunch is still a good moment to declutter. Pages that have had neither visitors nor links for years can go. The difference from blind tidying: you cut based on data, not on gut feeling.

On launch day: the technical classics

The most embarrassing relaunch mistakes happen in the final hours. The staging environment was blocked from Google so the unfinished site would stay out of the index, and that very block goes live with the site. A single forgotten noindex can make a website invisible for weeks.

Removed all noindex directives and robots.txt blocks from the staging setup?
Spot-checked the redirect map: do the 20 most important old URLs forward correctly with a 301 status?
Created the new XML sitemap and submitted it in Search Console?
Do canonical tags point to the new URLs, not to the staging domain?
Is the SSL certificate active, and do all variants (with and without www) resolve to a single address?
Actually submitted and tested the forms, phone links, and email addresses once for real?

After launch: watch it for four weeks

Going live does not finish the relaunch. In Search Console, the indexing report shows whether Google is picking up the new pages and whether 404 errors are piling up — old addresses that slipped through the redirect map. Those gaps can be closed after the fact, but only if someone is looking.

Some movement in rankings during the first weeks is normal. Google’s own Search Central documentation expects a small to medium-sized website to take a few weeks until most pages have moved in the index; larger sites take longer. A sustained drop over several weeks is not. That is when you go back through the checklist: missing redirects and deleted content are the cause in almost every case.

An honest note: when to hand this off

For a ten-page website you can work through this checklist yourself. For fifty pages or more, a shop, or a site that visibly generates enquiries, more is at stake than the time saved. Whoever builds the relaunch should treat the redirect map as a routine part of the project. Ask about it explicitly when comparing quotes: if redirects don’t come up at all, that is a warning sign.