How To Protect SEO During a Website Redesign

Redesigning a website is an exciting opportunity to refresh your brand, improve usability, and modernise your digital presence. But while visual updates are important, it’s crucial not to overlook the impact a redesign can have on your SEO. Without careful planning, your search rankings, organic traffic and visibility can suffer. In this post, we’ll explore key site redesign SEO considerations that we take into account and provide a practical site redesign checklist to help you safeguard your SEO while giving your site a fresh new look.

Start With an SEO Audit

Before any design work begins, a thorough SEO audit is essential. Identify your high-performing pages, track current rankings and make a note of pages that drive the most traffic. Understanding your site’s existing strengths allows you to plan changes without accidentally removing valuable content or disrupting your organic visibility.

As part of your web design SEO checklist, you should also review backlinks and ensure that authority pages are properly documented. This preparation is the first step in how to protect SEO during your redesign.

Plan Your Site Architecture

A successful redesign requires thoughtful planning of your site’s structure. Map your URLs and hierarchy to make sure navigation is intuitive for users and search engines alike. Properly organised site architecture not only improves user experience but also helps search engines crawl your site effectively.

When redesigning, consider how pages link to each other and how content is grouped. Including these elements in your site redesign checklist ensures your SEO isn’t an afterthought but a central part of your design strategy.

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Design With SEO in Mind

Web design and SEO go hand-in-hand. While it’s tempting to focus solely on aesthetics, elements like page speed, mobile responsiveness and structured data directly impact search performance. Optimising Core Web Vitals, compressing images and ensuring clean, semantic code are all critical components of your web design SEO checklist.

By incorporating these considerations during the design phase, you can ensure your site looks great while maintaining strong SEO foundations.

Implement Redirects and Preserve Valuable Content

One of the most common SEO pitfalls during a redesign is losing traffic due to URL changes or removed pages. Use 301 redirects to guide visitors and search engines from old URLs to their new counterparts. Avoid deleting high-value content without a plan. Every page that contributes to your rankings should either remain live or be thoughtfully redirected.

This step is a key part of how to protect SEO and should feature prominently on your site redesign checklist. Proper redirect management helps retain link equity and ensures users don’t encounter broken links or 404 errors.

Test and Monitor Post-Launch

Test your site in a staging environment before going live, and once the redesign is live, monitor rankings, traffic and crawl errors. Early detection allows you to fix problems quickly, minimising any negative impact on SEO.

Include post-launch monitoring in your web design SEO checklist to catch any unexpected drops and ensure your redesign enhances both the user experience and search performance.

A website redesign doesn’t have to compromise your SEO. By following a structured site redesign checklist, paying attention to site redesign SEO considerations and understanding how to protect SEO, our SEO and Web Design teams will work closely together to launch a site that looks modern, performs well and continues to attract organic traffic.

Redesigns are an opportunity to strengthen your online presence, when SEO and web design work together, your new site can be both visually stunning and search-optimised.

Planning a website redesign? Get in touch with our expert web design team to make sure your SEO stays protected while your site gets a fresh new look.