Anyone who has built websites for more than a year knows this scenario. The new site goes live on the domain, looks great, and two weeks later a worried client calls: “We’ve disappeared from Google.”
The good news: it’s almost always down to a specific, countable set of oversights, not a whim of the search engine. The bad news: fixing it after the fact takes weeks longer than doing it right in the first place.
Here’s the checklist we go through every time we replace a website. Seven points, in order.
1. List the URLs of all your old pages
Before you do anything, you need to know which URLs exist. Without that list, your redirects will be guesswork. There are a few tools for this: Google Search Console (the indexing report), the old site’s sitemap, and finally a crawler that goes through the site link by link.
The result should be simple: a list of every URL Google knows about. For a small business, that’s usually 10 to 50 entries.
2. Every old URL gets a 301 redirect
A 301 redirect tells Google: “this address has moved to a new one, carry its value over.” It’s the only correct way to keep your rankings when URLs change.
The most common mistake: the new site has different URLs, and the old ones simply stop working and show a 404 error. Google treats that like a business closing down: the URL drops out of the results within a few weeks. The second common mistake is redirecting everything to the homepage. Google ignores that, treating it as giving up on passing the value on.
A redirect has to be specific: old services page → new services page, old “about us” → new “about us”.
3. Don’t throw out content that brings in traffic
Before you agree to a new, “cleaner” structure, check in Search Console which pages actually bring in visits from Google. A service description that looks boring but brings in a hundred visits a month is the most important page your business has.
The new site can have fewer pages. But the ones that catch traffic must survive in the new version, ideally with their copy carried over and tidied up, not rewritten from scratch. Text that has spent months teaching Google what your business is about is an asset.
4. Carry over titles and descriptions
Every page has a title (the blue one in search results) and a description (the grey text beneath it). Google doesn’t always use them, but it often does. When you replace a website, it’s the easiest thing in the world to lose them and end up with empty or auto-generated ones.
The fix: carry the titles and descriptions over from the old pages while you move the content. It’s an hour’s work on a small site, and it saves your click-through rate in search results.
5. Publish a new sitemap
An XML sitemap is a file listing your URLs that you hand to Google on a plate. A new website means a new list of URLs, so a new sitemap. You need to upload it and submit it in Search Console.
Without it, Google will discover the new URLs on its own, but that takes time. With a sitemap, indexing starts within days, not weeks.
6. Keep an eye on the first six weeks
After the switch, a site goes through a period of uncertainty. Traffic can drop by 10 to 20% for a week or two while Google digests the new structure. That’s normal and doesn’t call for any action.
Action is needed when the drop is sharp and lasting. Then you check two things in Search Console: whether the old URLs really do redirect (the indexing report will show errors), and whether the new ones are indexed. Every broken redirect you find is a confirmed suspect.
7. Don’t panic and don’t roll the site back
The panic reaction, “let’s go back to the old version”, almost always makes things worse. Google gets its third URL change in a month and loses patience. If the redirects and content are right, the traffic comes back. We see it regularly: a full return to pre-redesign levels takes two to six weeks.
How we handle it
At Webomat, the agent handles points 1, 2 and 5 automatically: it reads every page of the old site, builds redirects from the old URLs to the new ones and publishes a sitemap together with the new version. A human approves it. The client gets the list of redirects to review and a Search Console checklist.
Example: what the process looks like for us
An illustrative scenario, put together from typical redesigns we have done over the years. A service business, an old WordPress site, 38 pages, traffic mostly from eight local search phrases.
Day one: the agent takes a snapshot of the site and a list of URLs. The indexing report shows Google knows 41 URLs, including three test versions from years ago. Those three have no content and no traffic left, so they will not get new counterparts.
Day one, an hour later: the agent reads the content of every page. Eight service pages bring in real traffic. The rest is a company history from 2014, three “under construction” pages and duplicates.
Day two: the new site is ready, and much leaner: 14 pages instead of 38. The client approves it. A redirect map is created: every old URL gets a new target or a parent page as its target. The three test URLs return 410 (gone for good) instead of redirecting to the homepage, because Google treats mass redirects to the homepage as 404 errors anyway.
Day three: launch, new sitemap, submission in Search Console. Traffic in the first week: down 8 percent. After three weeks: back to pre-redesign levels. After two months: up 20 percent, because the mobile pages load four times faster and people finally read what they’ve found.
This timeline is typical. A two- or three-week dip is normal, not a disaster. A disaster is a three-month dip, and that always comes from missing redirects or from throwing out content that was bringing in traffic.
How to check your redirects yourself
After any website replacement, you can verify the redirects in five minutes, without a developer:
- Open a private window in your browser (so the cache doesn’t lie to you).
- Paste in five old URLs, one by one, starting with the most important: homepage, services, contact, about us, one category.
- Each URL should turn into the new address in a split second, and the address bar should show the padlock.
- If you see “404” or “page not found”, you have a gap. Report it to whoever built the site, with the link.
A piece of good advice: save the list of old URLs before you replace the site. Afterwards it’s too late to get a complete list, because the old site no longer exists.
The mistakes we see most often
- The new site has URLs with parameters or that are case-sensitive, and the old redirects lead “almost” to the right place. Almost doesn’t count.
- There is a new sitemap, but nobody submitted it to Search Console, so Google spends weeks discovering the URLs.
- Auto-generated page titles (“Home · Company Name · Official Website”). Click-through rates in search results drop immediately.
- Moving old content to an archive with a “see older posts” note that no menu links to. That’s deletion, just more polite.
Everything else, meaning the decisions about content, stays with you. And rightly so, because nobody knows your customers better than you do.