Redesigning your website without losing Google traffic
A new site can look perfect and still lose its Google traffic if the old addresses go nowhere. How redirects protect a redesign, what to ask before launch and what to check after.
November 12, 2026Last updated November 12, 2026
The new site launched on a Tuesday. By Thursday everyone had shared it and the board had sent emails with exclamation points. Three weeks later, the front desk mentioned that the phone had gone quiet. Inquiries through the site were down too. Nothing was broken. Every page loaded, every button worked. The site was beautiful and, as far as Google was concerned, brand new and completely unknown.
This is the most common way a redesign goes wrong, and it’s almost invisible on launch day. Nobody notices for weeks, and by then the launch party is a fond memory and the analytics chart looks like a ski slope. It can be prevented with some patient, boring work, and it can usually be fixed even after the fact.
Your old site had addresses Google trusted
Over the years, Google learned that a page at one address was your services page and another was your contact page. Other sites linked to them. People bookmarked them. A local directory, a partner’s resources page and a newsletter from three years ago all point to specific addresses on your old site.
When the new site goes live with new addresses and the old ones simply disappear, all of that history points at nothing. Google is clear about what happens to pages that return “not found”: it removes them from its index if they were there before. The new pages start from zero, and zero takes a while to climb out of.
It happens so easily because new sites are usually organized better than old ones. The studio tidies things up, so “/our-services/counseling.html” becomes “/services/counseling”. It looks like an improvement, and it is one, as long as the old address knows where to send people.
Every old address needs a forwarding address
The fix is a redirect: a rule that sends anyone, person or search engine, from the old address to the new one. It works like the forwarding order you file with the post office when you move, except you file one for every page.
For a site move, Google recommends permanent redirects from each old address to its new one, set up on the server. With a permanent redirect, Google treats the new address as the real one and shows it in search results in place of the old.
It’s unglamorous work. Someone makes a list of every page on the old site and decides where each one should go now. When we moved Masa Viva off its old site, that list was part of the project, so the old site’s main links lead straight to the new pages.
How the redirect map gets made
Google’s guidance starts in the same place we do: “map your old site’s URLs” to the new ones before the move. In practice that means building a spreadsheet with two columns, old address and new address.
The old addresses come from a few places, and it’s worth checking more than one, since each misses something:
- The old site’s sitemap, if it had one.
- Your analytics, sorted by the pages people actually visited.
- Google Search Console, which shows the pages Google knows about.
- The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, for pages nobody remembers.
That last one is handy when the old site is already gone. The Internet Archive’s help page explains that you can see “all the files we have archived of the site” by searching for your domain with a wildcard.
Then someone goes down the list and decides, page by page, where each one should land. The counseling page goes to the new counseling page. The 2019 gala page goes to the events page. The page for a program you closed goes to the closest thing you still offer.
The most common shortcut is to send everything to the homepage. It feels tidy and it saves an afternoon. For a visitor looking for the counseling page, landing on the homepage is barely better than an error. Google’s own troubleshooting guidance reserves redirects for pages that have moved or have “a clear replacement” on your site.
Ask about it before anyone picks colors
Redirects are easy to forget because they don’t show up in any design review. Nobody has ever gasped at a well-made spreadsheet of old addresses. Ask your studio early, ideally in the first proposal conversation:
- Will you list every page on our current site before launch?
- Where will each old address send people?
- Will the redirects be permanent and set up on the server?
- Who checks Google Search Console in the weeks after launch?
If the answers are vague, it’s worth slowing down until they aren’t. If you’re still comparing studios, add these to the questions that make quotes comparable, because a low quote sometimes leaves this part out.
Test the old addresses yourself
On launch day, everybody tests the new site. Somebody should also test the old one. Take the twenty pages from your analytics that got the most visits and type each old address into a browser. Each one should land on the right new page, without a stop at an error page or the homepage.
Then try the links you can’t control. Search for your organization and click through from the results. Open that partner’s resources page and click your link. Ask the person who keeps every bookmark from 2015 to try theirs. In our experience, every organization has one of those people, and they are suddenly very useful.
Check the addresses that live outside the website, too. Old PDFs have addresses, like the intake form a partner clinic has linked to for years, and they are the ones most often forgotten. So do campaign pages that went out on printed flyers, or on a QR code taped to a waiting-room wall. Anything that was ever printed belongs on the list, because nobody can update paper.
Keep an eye on Search Console in the weeks after launch, especially any report of pages Google can’t find. A rising count of “not found” pages is the early warning, long before the phone goes quiet.
What normal looks like after a move
Some wobble is normal even when everything is done right. Google says visibility “may fluctuate temporarily during the move” and that a small to medium-sized site can take a few weeks for most pages to move. A dip in week two is expected. If the slide keeps going after a couple of months, it’s time to look closely.
The other thing to know is how long redirects should stay in place. Google’s advice is to keep them “for as long as possible, generally at least 1 year.” We’d keep them longer. The quiet failure we see is a redirect list that gets lost a year or two later, when the site changes hosting or someone cleans up settings that look unused. Write down where the redirects live, so the next person knows not to delete them.
If you already launched, it’s usually fixable
The old addresses are often still findable in Search Console, old analytics or an archived copy of your site. Redirects added late still help, and the sooner they go in, the better.
Start with the pages that used to bring in the most visits and inquiries, since those matter most. Map those first, test them, then work down the list. Then check the links you can update directly, like your Google Business Profile, social media bios and email signatures, and point them to the new addresses.
If your inquiries dropped after a redesign and you’d like us to take a look, book a 30-minute call. We’ll check what happened to your old pages and what can still be recovered.
