How to redesign without losing your Google rankings.

Straight answer first: a redesign does not hurt your rankings because the site looks different. Google does not have an opinion about your new colour scheme. Traffic drops after a redesign because of things that happen quietly alongside the redesign, usually to do with addresses, words, and settings that nobody thought to check.

That is genuinely good news, because it means the risk is avoidable rather than a gamble you take every time you improve your site. Here is what actually causes the drop, in the order it usually happens, and what to do about each one.

The page addresses change and nobody redirects them

This is the big one. It causes more post-redesign traffic loss than everything else combined.

Every page on your site has an address. If your plumbing page lives at yoursite.ca/plumbing and Google has spent two years learning that this is where your plumbing information lives, that address is worth something. Rebuild the site so the same page now lives at yoursite.ca/services/plumbing-services, and as far as Google is concerned the old page has vanished and a brand new one has appeared with no history.

You have two options and both are fine:

• Keep the addresses exactly as they are. Simplest and safest. There is rarely a good reason to change them, and "the new system does it differently" is not one. A new design does not require new addresses.
• Redirect every old address to its new one. If addresses must change, each old one needs a permanent redirect pointing at the page that replaced it. Not a redirect to the homepage. To the page that actually replaced it, because a redirect to the homepage tells Google the old page is gone and passes almost nothing on.

Before anything is built, somebody should write down every address on the current site and what it becomes on the new one. If nobody on the project has that list, the redesign is being done blind.

The words get thrown out with the design

The second biggest cause, and the one people walk into most cheerfully, because the old copy usually feels dated to whoever is looking at it.

The trouble is that your existing pages rank for phrases that are in the text. If a page ranking for "emergency plumber Mississauga" gets rewritten into something shorter and punchier that never says "emergency plumber Mississauga", the ranking goes with the old words. The page looks better and performs worse.

Rewrite the copy by all means, most sites need it. Just check what each page currently ranks for before you cut anything, and make sure the new version still genuinely covers that ground. Shorter is fine. Vaguer is not.

The new site launches with the settings still switched off

Almost every site is built somewhere private first, on a temporary address, with a setting that tells search engines to ignore it. That setting exists for a good reason: you do not want a half-built site appearing in search results.

Then the site goes live and somebody forgets to switch it back on. The site is perfect, it is public, real people can visit it, and Google has been politely instructed to pretend it does not exist. It can sit like that for weeks before anyone notices the phone has gone quiet.

It takes ten seconds to check and it should be the first thing anyone does on launch day.

The technical details do not come across

A handful of small things carry more weight than their size suggests, and they live in the code rather than on the page, so they are easy to leave behind:

• Page titles and descriptions. The text that appears in the search result itself. New systems often generate their own generic ones and quietly overwrite what was there.
• Your business information markup. The hidden data that tells Google your address, hours, and reviews. Losing it can cost you rich results in search.
• Your sitemap. The file listing every page. It needs regenerating so it lists the new site and not the old one.
• Image descriptions. Worth keeping for accessibility on its own merits, and they help image search too.

The launch checklist

If you do nothing else, do these, in this order:

• Write down every address on the old site before building starts.
• Keep those addresses, or map each one to its replacement and set up permanent redirects.
• Check the new pages still say what the old ones ranked for.
• On launch day, confirm search engines are allowed to see the site.
• Submit the new sitemap in Google Search Console.
• Click through every old address and confirm it lands somewhere sensible.

What to expect afterwards

Even a redesign done properly can wobble for a few weeks. Google has to recrawl everything and work out that the site it knew is the site it is now looking at. A small dip that recovers within a month is normal and not a sign anything is broken.

What is not normal is a drop that keeps going, or one that hits immediately and hard. That is usually a redirect problem or the visibility setting, and both are fixable once you know to look. Keep an eye on Search Console for the first month rather than assuming silence means success.

If your site is not showing up at all and you are not sure whether the redesign is to blame, the usual reasons a business is invisible on Google is the more general version of this problem, and worth working through first.