To rebuild a website without losing your Google rankings, keep the pages that earn them: the same addresses where you can, a one-to-one 301 redirect for every address that has to change, the same titles, content, internal links and structured data on pages that rank, and four to eight weeks of watching Search Console after launch. What follows is a checklist you can hand to whoever builds the new site.

Expect some movement even when it goes well. Google’s site move documentation says to expect ranking fluctuations, and that medium sites may take a few weeks for new addresses to appear. The aim is to keep the dip small and short, and to be able to tell why if something does drop. Google also advises changing only one thing at a time, so where you can, we would keep your domain name the same during the redesign.

If you are still deciding whether to rebuild at all, we have a framework for rebuild versus migrate. If speed is part of the reason, our post on website performance and revenue covers what to measure.

Before: work out what you are protecting

  1. Export the pages that earn traffic. In Search Console, open the Performance report, group the table by Pages, choose the longest date range available and use the export button. Clicks are the times someone clicked through from Google Search, and impressions are the times your site appeared. Sort by clicks and mark the top pages. Add any page that brings enquiries even if its clicks are low, such as a contact page or a service page. Your own enquiry records will tell you which.
  2. List every address on the old site. Google’s advice is to gather them from your sitemaps, your top-traffic pages, your server logs and your CMS, and to include images, videos, JavaScript and CSS. Your developer can also crawl the site. The result is one spreadsheet with a row per address. You cannot redirect an address nobody listed.
  3. Decide what happens to each one. Four options: keep the address as it is, move it to a new address with a redirect, merge it into the closest page that covers the same subject, or remove it. For content you are not moving, Google says to return a 404 or 410. Anything on your traffic list should be kept, moved or merged unless you can write down a reason.
  4. Take a before snapshot. For your top pages, record the title, meta description, main heading, word count, structured data and the pages that link to them. After launch you will compare against it. Our free website scan gives you a quality and AI-readiness score to keep with the snapshot.

During the build

  1. Build a one-to-one 301 redirect map. A two-column sheet: old address, new address. Google’s guidance is to use permanent redirects (301 or 308), to send each old address straight to its final destination, and to keep chains short. It also says not to redirect many old addresses to one irrelevant destination, such as the home page of the new site, and that permanent redirects do not cause a loss in PageRank. If the plan on the table is to send everything to the home page, that is the approach the documentation warns against. Ask for the map before launch.
  2. Keep what ranks on the pages that rank. That means the titles, headings, body text and internal links. A page ranks for what it says now. Rewrite it in the same month as the move and you have changed two things at once, and you cannot tell which one moved the numbers. Leave the rewrites until things settle. Do update internal links to point at the new addresses directly. Google’s guidance includes updating canonical tags and internal links to the new URLs.
  3. Carry over the structured data. This is the markup that tells Google what a page is, such as your business details or product information. Google’s structured data policies say it should sit on the page it describes and match what visitors can see. A new template only outputs it if someone builds that in, so ask your builder to show you the markup on the old and new version of your ten best pages, side by side.
  4. Keep the staging site out of Google. The test copy of the new site should not get indexed, because it can compete with your live site. Put it behind a password. If that is not possible, use a noindex tag, and do not block it in robots.txt instead: Google’s documentation says a page blocked by robots.txt cannot show its noindex tag to the crawler. Write down that the block is on, so someone remembers to take it off.

Launch day

  1. Pick a quiet day. Google suggests timing the move for lower traffic where you can. Choose a day when the person who built the site is around to fix things.
  2. Lift the block. Remove the password and the noindex tag, and check that the live robots.txt is not blocking the whole site. Google’s site move page tells you to remove any development-only noindex rules. It is a small step that is easy to forget, and the damage is large. If you also want AI assistants to find the new site, our guide to getting recommended by ChatGPT as a local business covers checking that the OAI-SearchBot crawler is not blocked.
  3. Submit the sitemap. Submit a sitemap of the new addresses in Search Console. Google also says to submit a sitemap of the old addresses alongside it while you monitor the move. Warnings that its addresses redirect are expected.
  4. Test the redirects. Check every address on your traffic list by hand. Each old one should return a 301 and land on the intended page in a single step. Then run the whole list of old addresses through a crawler and fix anything that returns a 404, loops or chains before the day is out. Check that the contact form and phone links work on the live site as well.

After: weeks one to eight

  1. Watch Search Console every week. In the Performance report, compare clicks and impressions for your traffic-earning pages against the same number of weeks before launch. The Page indexing report shows which addresses Google has found and which return errors. Our rule of thumb is to keep watching for four to eight weeks, and longer for a large site. A wobble in the first weeks is normal.
  2. Fix the 404s that matter. Google’s help says a 404 is not necessarily a problem if the page was removed without a replacement, and that it recommends fixing only the 404 errors you link to yourself or list in a sitemap. If a page has moved, use a 301 to the new location. So an address that used to earn traffic and has a new home becomes a new row in the redirect map. A 404 linked from your own pages is fixed at the link.
  3. Update the links you control. Social profiles, your Google Business Profile, email signatures and directory listings should point at the new addresses. Google says to update your own links and high-traffic external links, because redirects add delay for visitors. If your Google Business Profile needs a tidy while you are there, our guide to Google Business Profile for local trades covers it.
  4. Keep the redirects. Google says to keep them for as long as possible, generally at least one year. Put a date in the diary, so a later tidy-up does not delete them.

What this looks like on a real site

We replatformed Michael Heppell’s website from Webflow to a self-owned Astro build on Vercel. The site held 459 articles and 9 books, and all of them were migrated. We set up 459 redirects, preserved 2,932 reader comments, and the homepage mobile performance score (a Lighthouse lab test) went from 61 to 91. The full account is in the Michael Heppell case study.

The redirect map is the step that makes the rest safe to do. With that many articles there is no margin for a missing row, because each one is a dead address for someone who bookmarked it, linked to it or found it in Google. In his case there were 459 redirects, which is step 5 above at scale.

Handing it over

Give this to your builder before the work starts and ask them to confirm each step in writing. The steps that slip are the quiet ones: the map, the structured data comparison, lifting the staging block and testing the redirects on the live site. If nobody in your firm can judge the builder’s answers, our guide to IT support versus a technical lead explains who can.

If you are about to rebuild and want a second opinion on the plan, book a 30 minute call and bring whatever list you have so far. If you would rather we built it, that is the work our web development service covers.