A plain guide to relaunching your website without losing search traffic — redirects, URL structure, sitemaps, and the mistakes that make rankings disappear.
The Call We Keep Getting
We've migrated a lot of websites at this point, mostly for nonprofits and community organizations across Canada, and the pattern before we're involved is almost always the same. An organization launches a beautiful new site. Three weeks later someone notices that the contact form has gone quiet, checks analytics, and finds search traffic down 60 percent.
One community organization came to us after exactly this. Their old site had a health programs page that had quietly ranked for years and brought in most of their inquiries. The new site was genuinely better in every visible way. But that page's URL had changed, nothing pointed from the old address to the new one, and Google treated a decade of accumulated trust as a dead page. That trust doesn't transfer on its own. You have to carry it over.
The good news: a site migration that keeps your Google rankings is not a dark art. It's mostly one spreadsheet and some discipline.
The Redirect Map Is the Actual Project
Before anyone builds anything, pull a complete list of your current URLs. Every page, every post, every PDF. We pull ours from the sitemap, then cross-check against analytics and Search Console, because the sitemap alone always misses something. Old campaign pages. Tag archives. That annual report PDF from 2019 that somehow still gets downloads.
Then, one row at a time, decide where each URL goes on the new site. This is the redirect map. It is boring work and it is the whole job. If a page had traffic or backlinks, it gets a new home or a 301 redirect to the closest related page. If content is being retired, that should be a decision someone made on purpose, written down, not something discovered after launch.
A 301 tells search engines the page moved permanently and that its history should follow it to the new address. Skip it and you're starting from zero on every renamed page.
Here's an opinion we'll defend: the redirect map deserves more QA time than the design does. Nobody wants to hear that during a redesign. But we have never seen a migration lose rankings because a button was the wrong shade of blue, and we've seen several lose them because forty rows of a redirect spreadsheet never made it into the server config.
The Mistakes That Actually Tank Traffic
Three failures come up over and over in migrations we've been asked to rescue.
Everything redirects to the homepage. It looks tidy. It's also the fastest way to tell Google that none of your old pages matter anymore, and rankings for those specific topics evaporate. Redirect to the closest equivalent page, every time.
Broken redirect chains. Old URL points to a 2021 URL, which points somewhere newer, which 404s because someone renamed it last spring. Each migration stacked on the last without anyone flattening the chain. Every old URL should reach its final destination in one hop. We crawl the full redirect list before launch and again the morning after, because platform-level redirects have a way of behaving differently in production.
Changing every URL because the new platform prefers it. If you can keep your URL structure, keep it. An unchanged URL needs no redirect and carries its history untouched. When you genuinely must change one, keep it readable and close in spirit to the old one. A community health page should still say "health" somewhere in the path, not /page?id=4187.
Launch Week: Sitemaps, Search Console, and the Dip
The day the new site goes live, submit the new XML sitemap in Google Search Console. This one gets forgotten constantly, and forgetting it means Google finds your changes by wandering into them over weeks instead of being handed the map. While you're in there, confirm robots.txt isn't still carrying a disallow rule from staging. We've watched that single leftover line block an entire relaunch from being indexed.
Also update your internal links to point at new URLs directly rather than bouncing through redirects, and expect a dip. Rankings usually wobble for two to six weeks after a migration while everything gets re-crawled. On one museum-sector project we watched traffic sag about 15 percent for a month and then climb past the old baseline, because the redirect map was clean and the new site was simply better. The dip is normal. It's the recovery you're watching for.
When the Dip Isn't a Dip
Check Search Console weekly for the first six weeks. Coverage errors, 404 spikes, pages falling out of the index. A wobble that levels off and climbs is fine. A steady slide with no floor, or weeks of silence, means something is broken, and in our experience it's nearly always a hole in the redirect map rather than anything mysterious.
Planning a migration and want a second set of eyes on the plan before launch? Talk to us. Redirect maps are genuinely one of our favourite spreadsheets.
