Rebuilding an old website without losing the rankings it has

The story we hear every few months

A company rebuilds its website. The new one is clearly better looking. Three weeks later, calls are down by half and nobody can explain it, because the new site is obviously an improvement.

The cause is almost always the same: the old site had sixty pages ranking on Google, the new one has fifteen at completely different addresses, and the other forty-five now return 404. Google takes a few weeks to notice, and by the time it does you have dropped out of the results.

This is entirely preventable, and preventing it is half the work of a rebuild.

What we do before touching the design

Audit what exists. Pull every URL Google currently has indexed, sorted by traffic and by the keywords each one ranks for. This list usually surprises the owner — the page bringing in the most customers is rarely the home page, and is sometimes a blog post written four years ago that nobody remembers.

Decide per page: keep, merge, or drop. Pages with traffic keep their existing URL untouched, even when that URL is ugly. An ugly URL with rankings is worth more than a beautiful one nobody has heard of.

Map a redirect for everything that moves. A 301 from each old address to its specific new equivalent. Not "redirect everything to the home page" — Google treats that as the page having ceased to exist.

Check after launch. A week in, we go through 404s in Search Console and fix whatever slipped through. That is included.

When not to rebuild

If the current site works and merely looks dated, and you do not have budget for both the design and the ranking-preservation work, then doing half the job is worse than doing none. In that case, fixing specific problems — speed, the mobile layout, wrong information — is far cheaper and carries no risk.

We will tell you if that is the right answer for you.