Website Redesign & Migration — Without Losing Rankings

The most common way to lose search traffic is to redesign your website.

Not because the new design is worse. Because URLs changed, redirects were not mapped, and Google spent three months rediscovering a site it already knew. Traffic drops sharply the week after launch and nobody connects it to the redesign until the quarter is over.

This is entirely avoidable, and avoiding it is most of what a redesign project actually consists of.

What happens before the design

A full crawl of your current site. Every URL, every title, every page that has inbound links or ranks for something. You cannot preserve what you have not inventoried.

A redirect map. Every old URL points to its closest equivalent on the new site — not all to the homepage, which is the standard mistake and tells Google the old page is gone rather than moved.

Metadata carried across. Titles, descriptions and structured data that already earn clicks get preserved unless there is a reason to change them.

Only then does design start.

Replatforming

Moving between platforms — Wix to WordPress, WordPress to Shopify, anything to headless — carries the same risk with more moving parts, because URL structures differ by platform. The process is the same: inventory, map, migrate, verify.

I check the redirects on staging before launch and again immediately after, then watch Search Console for the first month. Problems that surface in week one are cheap to fix; problems found in month three have already cost you.

When a redesign is not the answer

If your site converts poorly but ranks well, the problem may be one page, not the whole site. If it is slow, that is often images and hosting rather than design. I would rather do a smaller job that fixes the actual problem than sell you a rebuild you did not need — and I will tell you which it is after looking.