A redesign should not be the day your enquiries fall off a cliff. Most “Google punished us” stories are self-inflicted: new URLs with no redirects, a staging noindex left on, or a pretty homepage that deleted the service pages that were ranking.
Inventory first
Export the current URLs (sitemap, Search Console, a crawl). Mark the ones with impressions or inbound links. Those URLs are assets. The new IA has to either keep them or 301 them to the closest equivalent.
Do not redesign the URL for fun
If /gas-safety-certificates/ ranks, do not “tidy” it to /services/gas/ without a reason and a redirect. Pretty slugs are not a strategy.
Staging is noindex. Live is not.
Password or noindex, nofollow on staging. When you go live, confirm the live homepage is indexable: robots.txt, meta robots, headers. I have seen hosts copy the staging flag. Check with the meta tool and robots tool on launch day.
The redirect map
A spreadsheet: old path → new path → 301. Test with the HTTP status checker (one hop, not a chain of three). Homepage-for-everything is how you create soft 404s.
Content that was ranking
If a service page brought calls, it still needs that service in the heading, not a brand poem. Design can change. The query cannot.
Launch week
- XML sitemap submitted in Search Console
- Spot-check top 20 old URLs
- Forms and mail (a ranking site with a dead form is still a failure)
- Core pages on a phone
What I will not promise
I will not guarantee rankings. I will run a rebuild so you do not throw away the ones you already earned. That is the honest version of “SEO-safe redesign”.
Rebuilding an existing UK site? Send the current URL →
