Inventory what exists before changing it
Collect the current public URLs from the site navigation, sitemap, and a crawl if available. With owner access, review Search Console and analytics for pages that receive relevant traffic. Add URLs used in paid ads, directory profiles, email signatures, QR codes, and printed materials; they can matter even when search traffic is low.
Record each page’s purpose, current title, proposed destination, and decision: keep, improve, combine, or retire. Keep a copy of the old site and configuration appropriate to the hosting platform. Do not assume a new page builder will preserve addresses or move redirects automatically.
Keep useful URLs when you can
A visual redesign does not require every address to change. If a URL is clear and still matches the page’s purpose, keeping it avoids an unnecessary move. If content is genuinely consolidated or renamed, choose the closest relevant destination rather than sending every old address to the homepage.
For example, an old roof-repair page should normally lead to the new roof-repair page. A retired service with no equivalent may need a helpful not-found response rather than a misleading redirect to an unrelated offer. Make those decisions based on customer intent, not a rule that every old URL must point somewhere.
Implement and test redirects at the hosting layer
Use an appropriate permanent server-side redirect for a permanent URL move. Test the actual HTTP response, destination, and any redirect chain. A link that eventually opens in your browser can still travel through several unnecessary hops or land on the wrong page.
Review URL variants such as www versus the main domain, HTTP versus HTTPS, trailing slashes, and old file extensions. The details depend on the current host and platform. Keep the rules explicit enough to avoid accidentally redirecting assets, API endpoints, or the new destination back to itself.
- Old URL → intended destination.
- Expected redirect status and a short path to the final page.
- Final page returns 200 and contains the relevant content.
- Unknown URLs return a real 404 with useful navigation.
Check what the new site tells search engines
Give each indexable page a descriptive title, useful meta description, and canonical URL on the production domain. Generate a sitemap containing canonical, indexable pages. Keep temporary review sites out of search with noindex or appropriate access restrictions, and confirm the production site does not inherit that setting.
Inspect the rendered HTML as well as the visible design. Important text and links should be available without waiting for a visitor to click an interface. A robots.txt file is not a substitute for a noindex directive, and blocking crawling can prevent a crawler from seeing the directive you intended it to read.
Verify real customer tasks before calling the launch complete
Test phone and email links, the contact form, form errors, successful receipt, and the actual notification path. Use approved test data. Check mobile navigation, image loading, readable contrast, and a missing-page route. Preserve a rollback option and avoid changing unrelated services such as email DNS while moving the website.
After launch, update important external links you control and submit the current sitemap through Search Console when access is available. Monitor indexing, broken URLs, and real inquiries. Search visibility can fluctuate during a move; careful planning reduces avoidable errors but cannot guarantee traffic or rankings.