Every agency knows the story where traffic dropped after a redesign. Fewer can say which page lost it, what that page used to rank for, and which line of the migration caused it. That version is more useful, so here is the process we run so the story has names in it.
Before anything is built
- Export the earning pages. Search Console, last sixteen months, landing page by query. This is the list that matters, and it is almost never the homepage.
- Crawl the old site to a baseline. URL, title, H1, meta description, word count, schema types, internal links out and in. The CSV is the thing we diff against afterwards – without it, “looks the same” is the only available check.
- Keep the slugs. Every URL that survives unchanged is a redirect you do not have to write, verify and maintain.
During the move
Redirects are one to one, exact page to exact page. A catch-all to the homepage is the single most expensive shortcut in a migration: it silently destroys the relevance of every deep URL. No chains either – a redirect that bounces through two more is slower, and crawlers stop following them eventually.
Staging gets noindex and HTTP authentication. Both. Noindex alone still lets a search engine see the site if a plugin leaks a URL, and a staging copy that gets indexed while the live site is mid-migration is a duplicate-content mess nobody wants to explain at the end of the month.
The two mistakes that cause most of the dip
Redirecting to the nearest page instead of the same page. A service page that lands on a services hub loses the specificity it spent three years earning.
Treating the redesign as permission to rewrite. New headings, shorter copy, “cleaned up” FAQs. Sometimes that is an improvement. It is never an improvement on the page that was already ranking, changed in the same release as forty other pages, with no baseline to compare against.
After go-live
Submit the new sitemap. Watch four things for four weeks: 404s in the crawl report, indexed count by template, coverage errors, and the query list for the pages on the earning export. Fix what shows up while the redirects are still doing their job and someone is still around who knows why each one exists.
A migration with a baseline is boring. Flux for two or three weeks, then the line comes back. A migration without one is a mystery that gets blamed on Google.
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