How to redesign without losing your rankings

A redesign is the most common reason a healthy site loses traffic. It does not have to happen.

Crawl before you touch anything

Export every indexable URL, its title, its H1 and its inbound links. This is your baseline.

Build the redirect map

Every old URL maps to the closest new URL. Not the homepage. One-to-one wherever possible.

The two checks after launch

1. Crawl the old URL list against the live site and confirm every one returns a 301 to a 200.
2. Compare titles and H1s on your top 50 landing pages against the baseline.

Those two checks catch most of the drops I am asked to fix later.