Website Redesign SEO Checklist: A 4-Phase Plan for Small Business Sites

This website redesign SEO checklist is what we work through on every rebuild, so a small business keeps the Google traffic its old site earned. Most of the drops we see after a relaunch come from two mistakes: pages that moved to a new address without a redirect, and pages that used to rank and were quietly left out of the new site. Both are avoidable with a list and an afternoon of checking.

It’s written for small sites of roughly 10 to 100 pages: a trade moving off an old WordPress theme, a clinic leaving a website builder, a shop moving to a new platform. If you’re redesigning with us, this is built into our website redesign service. If you’re working with someone else, take the list to them and ask who owns each step.

Google ranks individual pages, so anything that changes a ranking page’s address, content or links can move it. On small sites these are the usual causes:

• A page’s URL changes and nothing redirects the old one, so visitors and Google hit a 404.
• A page that ranked is cut because it “didn’t fit the new design”.
• Titles and headings are rewritten away from the words people searched for.
• The staging site’s noindex tag or robots.txt block goes live with the new site.
• Internal links to a key page disappear from the menu or footer.
• The new site is slower on a phone than the old one.

None of these needs a specialist tool to catch. They need someone to check them in the right order, which is what the checklist below is for.

Four phases, from the week before work starts to a month after launch. Tick items off as you go; each phase is explained underneath.

Export the evidence before anything changes, because once the old site is gone you can’t check what it was doing. In Google Search Console, export 12 months of pages and search queries. In Google Analytics, export your top landing pages and the enquiry events, such as phone taps and form sends. Keep both: in week 3 after launch, they’re what you compare against.

Then list every URL the old site has. A crawler is the quickest way; the free version of Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider crawls up to 500 URLs, which covers most small business sites. Add any URLs from your sitemap and Search Console that the crawl missed, then mark the pages that bring traffic, enquiries or links from other websites. Those are the pages you can’t afford to lose.

Every old URL needs a destination: the same URL if it still exists, otherwise the closest new page. Google recommends mapping old URLs to new ones and redirecting each one permanently on the server. Redirecting everything to the homepage throws away what each page ranked for.

Redirect straight to the final page. Google advises against chains and says that if you can’t avoid one, keep it short: ideally no more than 3 hops and fewer than 5. If an old URL was itself already redirecting somewhere, point it at the new final page instead of adding another hop.

Yes, but only when there’s a reason, and every change needs a redirect. Keep the URLs of pages that rank well. Changing “/boiler-repairs.html” to “/services/boiler-repair” is worth it on a rebuild because the new structure will last; changing a URL because you prefer the wording rarely is.

Use either for a page that has moved for good. Google treats 301 and 308 the same way: both say a page has moved permanently, and both tell Google to show the new URL. The one difference is technical. A 308 tells the browser to resend a form submission or API request exactly as it was, while a 301 lets older browsers switch it to a plain page request. For normal pages that makes no difference.

So use whatever your platform gives you for a permanent redirect. WordPress redirect plugins and most hosts’ .htaccess rules send 301s. Next.js sends a 308 when a redirect is marked permanent, which is what our own site uses for articles we’ve merged. What matters is that it’s permanent and server-side.

# .htaccess on Apache (most WordPress hosts): a 301
Redirect 301 /boiler-repairs.html https://www.example.co.uk/services/boiler-repair

// next.config.js: permanent: true sends a 308
async redirects() {
  return [
    { source: '/boiler-repairs.html', destination: '/services/boiler-repair', permanent: true },
  ];
}

Build the new site on a staging copy and check it against your export before anything goes live. For each page that ranks, keep the title, the H1 and the substance of the content unless the page’s purpose is changing. A new design can change how a page looks without changing what it says. Rebuild the internal links too: if your bathrooms page was linked from the menu and three service pages, it should be on the new site.

Copy across the details that are easy to miss: structured data such as LocalBusiness, image alt text, the business name, address and phone number in the footer, and any FAQ answers that showed in search. Then test the key pages on a phone, and run them through PageSpeed Insights so the new site is at least as quick as the old one.

Turn on the redirects first, then test them by hand. Paste your top 20 old URLs into a browser and check each one lands on the right new page in one step. Check the live site has no noindex tag and that robots.txt isn’t blocking anything from staging. Submit the new sitemap in Search Console, then tap your own phone number and send a test enquiry to confirm Analytics records both.

For a small or medium site, move everything on the same day. Google recommends that over moving one section at a time, which suits bigger sites.

Use Search Console’s Change of Address tool, but only after the redirects are live. It’s for moving to a new domain or subdomain, not for redesigns on the same domain, a switch to https or a change of host. You need to own both properties in Search Console, and Google asks you to keep the redirects for at least 180 days.

Expect some movement. Google says rankings fluctuate during a move and that for a medium-sized site it can take a few weeks or more before the new URLs fully replace the old ones. Check Search Console’s page indexing report each week, fix any 404s that appear for old URLs, and compare traffic and enquiries for your top pages with the export you took before you started.

Update the links you control: your Google Business Profile, directory listings, social profiles and email signatures. Then leave the redirects alone. Google’s advice is to keep them for as long as possible, and at least a year. We leave them in place for good, because old links in emails and on other sites keep working.

If a page that used to bring enquiries is still down after a month, look at what changed: its URL, its title, its content or its links. If the answer is “nothing”, our guide to why websites fail covers the causes that have nothing to do with the redesign.

On every website redesign we crawl the old site, keep URLs that rank, map and redirect the rest, check titles, headings and structured data on staging, and check Search Console after launch. It’s part of the price, which follows our website packages from £400. Want to know where your current site stands first? Our free website check looks at speed, page titles, indexing, your Google Business Profile and how easy it is to get in touch, and comes back within 48 hours.

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