Protect your SEO before you redesign your website

If you’re here, you’re most likely thinking that your website is about to go through a redesign. You’ve been staring at your website for months, maybe a little bit longer, thinking about everything you could change if you could just start it over: maybe a new layout, better navigation, copy that finally sounds like you instead of the you three years ago.

Then someone mentions the thing that makes most founders freeze on the spot: “But what about your SEO?” 

I know you’ve worked hard for what you’ve got, before you spiral: redesigning your site does not have to mean losing your rankings. It can if you treat the redesign as just a design project and forget that it is basically a migration. (Yes, even if you don’t move platforms, but if you move platforms, this applies even more.)

Google’s own documentation is clear that that aside move is considered complete only once Googlebot has revisited every URL on both the old and new site at least once. There’s no fixed timeline for that, which means the businesses that protect their SEO aren’t just looking at keeping the pages as close as possible to the original, but they planned around what that move might look like, not just the new design around it.

Let’s talk about how to do that!

Why redesigns tank rankings even when they’re good?

I want to be really clear about something. When you see a traffic dip after a redesign, it is not automatically a disaster or an indication that something was done wrong.Shopify’s own documentation notes that a short-term traffic change of roughly 0% to 20% in the first month after you redesign and launch is very common. It’s only when the clients are larger than that or when they persist past the initial transition that it signals a problem might lie underneath.
(Source: Shopify)

So it’s totally normal if you launch and you see a small wobble the first few weeks. Just breathe. Google is re-crawling and re-calculating, and not just Google. Every single search engine is gonna take similar approaches to re-crawling your website, so that is expected.

Now, if we talk about the things that will actually tank your rankings beyond this little transition time, it will almost always come down to a handful of things:

• The URLs change with no redirect plan.
• Content is just dropped because it didn’t fit the new design
• Metadata (like title, description, headers) rebuilt from scratch instead of preserved
• internal links left pointing at pages that don’t exist anymore

None of that is a Showit problem, or a WordPress problem, or a platform problem of any kind. That is a planning and strategy problem. I talk about this kind of pattern platform getting blamed for what is actually a setup or a strategy issue in my post Before You Blame Showit SEO, Read This, and redesigns are where that kind of pattern shows up the most!

What to have ready before you touch anything and start redesigning your website

Before any of the new pages get designed, you need a clear picture of what your current site is doing really well. Not what you think it’s doing well or the things that you like, but what’s actually measurably working. You know that I will always tell you to go look at your stats.

So that means pulling together:

Your current URL list

Yes, every single page that lives right now inside of your website that is live and that robots have crawled it, especially the ones that are bringing in traffic. If you don’t know which pages those are then the first thing is to find those out because those are the pages that you want to protect the most above anything else.

Your top performing page is metadata

While you’re collecting your URL list and looking at your top-performing pages, things like titles, meta descriptions, and header structure need to be noted for the redesign. You don’t need to keep any of it exactly as is. Your new copy can absolutely be better, but you need to know what’s there now so nothing gets lost by accident.

A map from old URLs to new URLs

This is a part that I see people skip a lot, and it really matters because if a page URL is changing in any way, shape, or form, even slightly, it needs a new destination that is going to be mapped before the launch, not something that you figure out after.

Your existing backlinks

If other sites have been linking to specific pages of your website or even your homepage, those links carry a lot of SEO equity. When you redesign and you change any of those links that someone was linking to, Then the link is basically non-existent, and that SEO equity goes to die as well.

I know that it might sound a little bit like homework before you get to the fun part of actually redesigning your website, and it totally is, but it is very much worth it. It is the difference between a redesign that protects what you’ve built and one that will accidentally reset it to zero!

The pre-redesign SEO checklist you need

The thing about searching for an SEO checklist is that you’ll find that they’re written for developers and not the actual people who are behind the business. Let me translate it into a version that actually matters for your decision making through this process, not just for your developer’s task list.

Before you launch, you want to be able to say yes to all of these:

1. Every existing URL that’s changing has a destination that you mapped out, not just a plan to figure it out later.
2. Every high traffic page has a permanent redirect ready (usually marked as a 301), and you will make that live the same day the new site goes live.
3. Your top page titles, the meta descriptions, and the header structures have been reviewed, and if they will be replaced, there’s a plan in motion and an intentional change. (Remember, otherwise you’re going to be scraping all of that goodness away!!)
4. Your internal links point to the new URLs, not the old ones.
5. You have a way to monitor what happens in the first few weeks after your launch.

That’s it! It’s as simple as that! It’s easy to skip when you’re excited about the new home page or the new design or the new images that will go in there, but I urge you to slow down and make sure that you have these things checked.

How to launch without losing the SEO you’ve already earned

Once your audit is all done and the redirects are mapped, launching is not really the finish line (I know, I’m sorry) but truly it’s the start of the part where your patience matters more than perfection.

First, just expect some fluctuation and don’t panic at it.

We talked about this earlier. It will always have some disturbance, and it can look like a small dip in the first few weeks. That’s totally normal, Google and other search engines need time to re-crawl your new beautiful website.

Watch your top pages specifically, not just your overall traffic.

If your homepage traffic has been holding steady, that’s awesome, but if your highest-converting service page suddenly drops, that is a little cue to go check (because something in the migration or this redesign didn’t go the way that it was supposed to). Even if the big-picture number looks fine, this is something I would put extra attention to!

Give it time before you assume something’s wrong.

As much as we don’t like it, there is actually no fixed crawl frequency. How fast Googlebot moves really depends on the site’s size and how quickly it’s able to crawl it. A week is rarely enough time to know anything for certain, but I typically give it a good four weeks, depending on the volume of your site traffic.

Keep your redirects live.

Don’t remove them once you feel like everything has settled and everyone knows the new links and your new pages are ranking. You NEED to keep those redirects because you don’t control everywhere they have been linked before when you still have that old site. They’re basically going to continue to work in the background for longer than you think.

Redesigning a Showit Site? A Few Things to Know!

Now, for my fellow Showit users, the good news is that the platform gives you good control here for your page titles, your meta descriptions, the header structured alt tags, all of that is yours to manage directly. Your blog runs on WordPress underneath, so long-form SEO content isn’t limited by the visual builder at all. If you are just redesigning a Showit website, even if you change the design of your blog, your actual posts remain in the WordPress database, and they will just take in the new design when you hit publish.

I think most people forget that when you do a redesign and Showit, that is still a full migration if your URL’s navigation or page structure changed at all. Please treat it with the same care that you’d give to any other platform’s migration, because in Google’s eyes, that is exactly what it is!!

Your Pre/During/Post Redesign Loop

If you’ve been around for a while, you know I look at almost everything through my PDP experience loop, aka Pre/During/Post. A redesign is honestly one of the cleanest examples of why that framework works:

Pre:  Audit what’s working, map out those redirects that we talked about, document your metadata. This is the work that happens before anyone sees a single new design mock-up.

During: Build with your map in hand. Every new page has a known destination for its old counterpart.

Post: Launch (celebrate!!), monitor, and hold! Watch your top pages specifically. Keep your redirects live and give Google and other search engines the time that they actually need to crawl your new website.

If you skip the pre-phase… the during and post-phases are just damage control, BUT if you do the pre-phase right, the rest of this becomes a lot less scary.

A Few Quick Takeaways

1. A small traffic dip in the first few weeks is normal. A large or ongoing one is a signal to investigate.
2. Redirect mapping matters more than almost anything else on this list.
3. Metadata should be reviewed and improved, not just wiped and rebuilt.
4. Your platform isn’t the risk. Skipping the planning is.

If you’re staring down a redesign plan right now and you’re not sure whether you’re actually ready, or you just want a second set of eyes on your plan before you touch anything live, that’s something I can help with on a Strategy Call. Sixty minutes, and a clear next step for your redesign.

And if you want to do a broader self-assessment first, on your own time, grab my Website Optimization Checklist, it walks you through best practices for your site regardless of platform, redesign or not!