A website relaunch without losing rankings: the checklist

A new website is something to celebrate — until the enquiries dry up two weeks after launch. The most common cause of a sudden ranking loss is not a Google update but a relaunch without an SEO plan. Here is how to avoid it.

Before the relaunch

• Take stock: Export every URL of the old website (Screaming Frog or the sitemap) and note which pages have traffic and rankings (Search Console, last 12 months).
• Redirect plan: Every old URL needs a destination on the new site. Old URL → new URL, as a 301 redirect. No blanket redirect to the homepage — Google devalues that.
• Preserve content: Pages that rank do not get “quickly rewritten”, they get migrated carefully. Move first, optimize afterwards.

At launch

• Activate the 301 redirects and spot-check them
• Submit the new XML sitemap in Search Console
• Check that the new site is not set to “noindex” (the classic: the staging setting goes live with it)
• Test load time and mobile rendering on your most important pages

After the relaunch

• Week 1: Check crawl errors in Search Console daily and work through the 404 reports
• Weeks 2–8: Compare rankings and traffic on your key pages against the old figures. Fluctuation is normal, drops above 20 % are not.
• Month 3: Keep the redirects! 301s should stay in place for at least a year.

The three most expensive relaunch mistakes

1. Changing URLs without redirects — by far the most common and most costly error.
2. Cutting content drastically, because the new site should look “tidier”. Google ranked the old content — once it is gone, so are the rankings.
3. Going live on a Friday afternoon. If something breaks you find out on Monday — after a weekend full of 404 pages.

In summary

A relaunch is not a risk when it is planned. We guide relaunches from the URL list through to the follow-up checks — so the new website is not only better looking, but better found.