Replacing your website without losing your SEO
A rebuild is the moment many sites lose their positions. Here is how to stop your traffic from evaporating.
Building a new site is the fun part. Doing the move right is the part that goes wrong. In a rebuild many organisations lose their search positions in one go, because the SEO does not come along. That is almost always avoidable.
Why SEO breaks in a rebuild
Most of the damage comes from three things: URLs that change without redirects, content that quietly disappears, and meta data that does not come along. Google has spent years understanding your old site. Without signposts to the new one, that knowledge, and your traffic, is lost.
The step plan
A migration without loss follows a fixed order:
- Inventory every old URL, your top-performing pages and your inbound links.
- Give each old URL a 301 redirect to the right new page.
- Bring content and meta data along, and lose no copy that drew traffic.
- Deliver a new XML sitemap and update the structured data.
- Measure indexing and positions after launch and adjust where needed.
The site can stay online
You do not have to go offline to move. We build the new site alongside the existing one and only switch over once everything is ready and tested. That way there is no gap where visitors or Google land on an empty page.
It often gets better
Done well you lose nothing, and often you win. A faster, better-structured site usually performs better in the results than the old one. The migration is then not a risk but an opportunity.
This is how we approach a website migration, as part of a new corporate site.