The most costly mistake in a relaunch is not one of taste or technique, but of addresses.
You maintain your positions with a new website by sending each old address with a permanent redirect to the most suitable new address, maintaining the content that ranked, and monitoring indexation after go-live. Without redirects, every old address loses its accumulated value and you effectively start over.
STEP BY STEP
This is how you do it
- First, make a list of your current addressesExport all URLs from Search Console and your current sitemap before anything changes. This is the only step that you cannot restore afterwards: after going live, the old structure is gone.
- Make note of which pages are driving trafficIn Search Console, find which pages are getting impressions and clicks. These are the pages that you treat with priority; the rest can go to a logical collection page.
- Create a redirect mapLink each old address to the best matching new one. One on one where possible. If the page no longer exists, choose the nearest relevant page: not the homepage by default, which Google treats as a soft 404.
- Keep the content that rankedA page ranks based on its text. If you halve that text because the new design is sleeker, you lose what you were found for. Feel free to rewrite, but keep the topic complete.
- Put 301, not 302A 301 says permanent and transfers the accrued value. A 302 says temporary and doesn't. This regularly goes wrong and the difference is one number.
- Test the redirects before going liveCheck the list on the test environment. Each redirect must go to the end goal in one step; chains of three or four references lose time and sometimes value.
- Submit and monitor the new sitemap for two monthsAfter go-live: submit sitemap, track indexation and check for 404s weekly. A temporary dip of a few weeks is normal; if it remains low after two months, a redirect is missing.
PITFALLS
What usually goes wrong
By far the most common mistake is pointing everything to the homepage. That feels neat but is counterproductive: Google sees a lot of references to one page as a signal that the old pages are simply gone.
The second is to use the relaunch to also shorten the texts considerably. Two changes at the same time also makes it impossible to determine what caused the loss.
- Not everything to the homepage — Google reads that as a soft 404.
- No 302 where 301 belongs — temporary does not transfer value.
- No redirect chains — to the final destination in one step.
- Do not halve content — you rank on text that you then discard.
- Update internal links — do not continue to refer to old addresses.
- Measuring from day one — without a baseline measurement you don't know what you lost.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
More about a relaunch
How much traffic will I temporarily lose?
With a well-executed migration, a dip of a few weeks is normal and then recovers. If you still see significantly less after two months, there is usually a structural cause: missing redirects, shortened content or pages that are not indexed.
Do I need to change my URL structure?
Only if the current structure really gets in the way. Changing addresses because the new structure feels more logical is taking risk without reward. If the structure remains the same, the entire migration is a lot safer.
Can I keep the old site as a backup?
Yes, and that is sensible: but not publicly available. Two sites with the same content online compete with each other. Keep it as a backup, not as a second website.
Do you do this as standard with a relaunch?
Yes. Redirect map, maintenance of ranking content and indexation monitoring after go-live are part of the job. We did this during the recruiter relaunch where the site became three times faster without losing positions.
CONTINUE READING
Of course, continue reading about this subject.
Relaunch without loss?
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