Keep your Google rankings through a redesign

Measure first

Before anyone touches the design, record where you stand so you can compare after launch:

• Pages that bring traffic: from Search Console’s Performance report, export the top pages and queries of recent months, with clicks and average position.
• Every URL: combine your sitemap, your WordPress or Shopify admin, Search Console’s Links report and your analytics or server logs.
• The Core Web Vitals of key templates; see Core Web Vitals in plain language.

1. Keep the URLs that already rank

The safest redirect is the one you never need. If the platform stays, keep slugs (the end of each URL) and folder structure as they are, and launch the new design on the same URLs.

In WordPress, Settings › Permalinks sets the URL structure of posts, pages, categories and tags; changing it changes every post URL at once, so leave it alone. In Shopify, products, collections, menus, pages and blog posts live apart from the theme, so a new theme doesn’t change or delete them.

A platform change means some URLs will change; on Shopify, for example, product and collection URLs follow fixed patterns (/products/… and /collections/…). Every changed URL needs a redirect. Still choosing a platform? See WordPress or Shopify?

For new URLs, follow Google’s advice: readable words, not long ID numbers; hyphens, not underscores; and your visitors’ language. Google treats upper and lower case as different, so stick to one, such as all lowercase.

2. Map every old URL to its new one

Turn your list into a table, old URL next to new URL, and point each old page to its closest match: product to product, post to post, category to category.

Don’t send lots of old URLs to one unrelated page such as the homepage; Google warns this can confuse users and may be treated as a soft 404, that is, like an error page. A page that’s truly gone, with no equivalent, can return 404 or 410; Google drops such URLs from its index over time.

Include images, videos and downloads such as PDFs; Google says their URLs must move like all other content.

3. Use 301 redirects, not 302

301 and 308 are permanent redirects: Google uses them as a signal that the new URL should be canonical, the address it picks as most representative of that content. 302, 303 and 307 are temporary; Google doesn’t use them as that signal, and the old URL may stay in results.

Set redirects up on the server; Google suggests JavaScript redirects only as a last resort. Send each old URL straight to its final address: chains slow visitors down, and Google’s crawlers follow at most 10 hops. Keep redirects as long as possible, at least a year.

On Shopify, add redirects under Content › Menus › URL redirects or import a CSV file; a redirect won’t work while the old URL still loads a page. On WordPress, use the server or a redirect plugin.

4. Keep the content and links that rank

Move pages that bring traffic with their text, subheadings, SEO title and meta description, not just their look. If you change any of these, make it a deliberate decision, not a side effect of the design.

New menus and templates can quietly drop links to some pages. Google’s rule: every page you care about should be linked from at least one other page on your site. Update internal links from the old URLs to the new ones, so they don’t pass through redirects.

Each new page needs a canonical tag pointing to itself; on multilingual sites, update hreflang annotations to the new URLs too.

5. Keep the test site out of search

Build the new design on a password-protected copy of the live site (a staging site). Google recommends a password for content only authorized people should see, which also keeps it out of Search; noindex keeps a page out of the index, but it can still be opened through links.

On Shopify, build the new design as a draft theme; after you publish it, the old one stays in your drafts to switch back to.

If you use robots.txt blocks or noindex during development, note where; you’ll remove them all on launch day.

6. Don’t bundle the website redesign with other big changes

Google’s site move guide recommends one change at a time: move the domain first, then change the design, with a platform (CMS) change as a separate step too. If traffic shifts, you’ll know which step to check.

If the domain changes too, use Search Console’s Change of Address tool. It’s only for moves to a new domain or subdomain, not for path changes or a switch to HTTPS.

Changing hosting too? Keep the old server running until its traffic reaches zero, as Google suggests; a brief dip in Googlebot’s crawl rate after the move is normal.

7. Launch-day checklist

On launch day, check:

• Development blocks are gone: on WordPress, “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” under Settings › Reading is unchecked; on Shopify, the store is out of private mode; robots.txt doesn’t block the new site.
• Every old URL that brought traffic reaches the right page in one hop: test single URLs with Search Console’s URL Inspection tool, batches with a crawler or script.
• Redirect targets actually load. Google says it frequently sees redirects to URLs that don’t exist on the new site.
• Redirects have been tested in a private window or on another device, since browsers cache 301s.
• A sitemap with the new URLs is submitted in Search Console.
• Every page has its SEO title, meta description and canonical tag.
• Menus and in-text links point straight to the new URLs.
• Search Console verification and your analytics code work on the new site.
• The homepage and a few key pages have been tested on mobile in PageSpeed Insights; for slow ones, see Why is your site slow?

8. After launch: watch Search Console

Check the Page indexing report often in the first weeks. Old URLs listed as “Page with redirect” are expected. “Not found (404)”, “Soft 404”, “Redirect error” and “URL marked ‘noindex’” are the ones to fix. In the Sitemaps report, watch the new URLs get indexed.

In the Performance report, compare the weeks after launch with the period before, page by page; if an old URL that lost traffic returns a 404, add the missing redirect. Some fluctuation is normal: Google says rankings settle down over time.

Ask important sites that link to you to update their links, and update your social profiles and ad campaigns.

Where to start

Start with the list. Before the design is signed off, export the pages that bring traffic and every URL you have; the redirect map, content decisions and launch-day checks are all built on it.

To capture where you stand before a redesign, our free 48-point inspection is a good place to begin. URL structure, indexing status, sitemap and robots.txt, canonicals, internal links and 404s are all among its checks, so you know what to protect before anything changes.