In a 2026 website redesign, keep your URLs (or 301-redirect every old one to its new home), the pages and words that already bring in search traffic, your analytics history, and anything that still produces enquiries. Drop pages nobody visits, slow scripts and plugins, inaccessible design, and anything that blocks search or AI crawlers. Do the work in three stages: an inventory and baseline before you design anything, redirects and checks during the build, and a launch-day and 30-day review after. The avoidable way to lose search traffic in a redesign is to skip redirects or delete pages without checking what they ranked for.

What should you do before the redesign starts?

Before anyone opens a design tool, write down what the current site does well. You can't protect what you haven't measured.

1. Export what ranks. In Google Search Console, open the Performance report and export queries and pages for the longest date range available. The report shows clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position, and has an export button (Google Search Console Help). Sort by clicks. Any page with real clicks is a page you keep, or redirect to a page that covers the same thing.
2. Build a content inventory. List every URL: from your sitemap, your CMS, your analytics top pages, and Search Console. Google's site-move guidance says to build the URL list from exactly these sources and to include images and videos too (Google Search Central). For each URL, mark it keep, merge, rewrite or drop.
3. Record an analytics baseline. Write down the last 90 days of visits, enquiries or sales, conversion rate, and the top ten landing pages. Note which form or button each enquiry came from. After launch, this is the only way to know whether the new site is better or just different.
4. Measure current speed. Run your top pages through PageSpeed Insights and save the Core Web Vitals. You want a before number to beat.
5. Save a copy of the old site. Keep a crawl or export of the old pages, their titles, descriptions and structured data. Old copy that ranked is worth reusing.
6. Ask what isn't working. If the site gets visits but no enquiries, a new look won't fix that on its own. Read our guide on traffic but no leads first, so the redesign fixes the real problem.

What should you keep from the old website?

• URLs that rank or get linked to. If you can keep the same address, keep it. A page that moves needs a redirect.
• The words that rank. If a page ranks for "bridal makeup Chicago", the new page must still say bridal makeup and Chicago in its heading and copy. Rewriting for style and losing the phrase people searched is a common way to lose traffic.
• Proof. Reviews, case studies, press mentions, client names you have permission to use.
• Working forms and integrations. Booking, payment, CRM and email connections that the team relies on every day.
• Analytics and Search Console. Keep the same properties so your history carries over.

What should you drop?

• Pages with no visits, no links and no purpose. Old event pages, thin tag archives, duplicate service pages. Merge them where a better page exists, and redirect.
• Heavy scripts and unused plugins. Chat widgets nobody answers, sliders, tracking tags for tools you cancelled. They slow the page and rarely earn their place.
• Vague headlines. "Welcome to our world" says nothing. "Wood-fired dinners in Austin, book a table tonight" does.
• Design that excludes people. Low-contrast grey text, tiny tap targets, images with no description.
• Anything that blocks search or AI crawlers by accident. Old robots.txt rules, leftover noindex tags, content hidden behind scripts.

What should you check during the build?

Map every old URL and set 301 redirects

Google says to "map your old site's URLs to the URLs for the new site" and recommends permanent redirects such as 301 or 308 where possible. Send each old URL straight to its final page in one hop, avoid pointing many old pages at one unrelated page such as the home page, and keep the redirects "at least 1 year" (Google Search Central). Google's redirect documentation calls a permanent server-side redirect "the best way to ensure that Google Search and people are directed to the correct page" (Google Search Central). A spreadsheet with two columns, old URL and new URL, is enough. Every row in your content inventory needs a destination.

Set speed targets

Use Google's Core Web Vitals as the target: Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less, and Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less, measured at the 75th percentile of page loads on mobile and desktop (web.dev). In practice that means compressed images in modern formats, fonts that don't block the page, and very few third-party scripts. Test on a mid-range phone, not only the designer's laptop.

Build in accessibility basics

WebAIM's 2026 scan of the top one million home pages found detected WCAG failures on 95.9% of them, with low-contrast text on 83.9%, missing image alt text on 53.1% and missing form labels on 51% (WebAIM). A redesign is the cheapest moment to fix these. Use WCAG 2.2 as the standard: text contrast of at least 4.5:1 (3:1 for large text) (W3C), tap targets of at least 24 by 24 CSS pixels (W3C), a description on every meaningful image, a visible label on every form field, and a page language set in the HTML.

Carry over and add structured data

Structured data tells search engines what a page is: an organization, a product, a local business, an event, an FAQ. Google recommends JSON-LD and the Rich Results Test to check it (Google Search Central). Only mark up what visitors can see; Google's guidelines say "Don't mark up content that is not visible to readers of the page" (Google Search Central). If the old site had structured data, check that the new templates still output it.

Let AI search crawlers in

Decide on purpose which crawlers can read the site. OpenAI's documentation says OAI-SearchBot is for search and that sites that opt out of it "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers," while GPTBot is used for training foundation models and blocking it does not affect search visibility (OpenAI). Perplexity documents PerplexityBot as the crawler that surfaces sites in Perplexity search results (Perplexity). You can allow the search crawlers and make a separate choice about training crawlers. Write that choice into robots.txt and check that your hosting or security settings don't block these bots anyway. Our guide on getting recommended by ChatGPT covers the rest.

Test every form end to end

Submit every form on the staging site with a real email address. Check that the message arrives, lands in the right inbox or CRM, sends the visitor a confirmation, and records a conversion in analytics. Do it on a phone. Then do it again after launch, because forms can break when the domain changes.

The redesign checklist

What should you check on launch day?

1. Remove staging blocks. Staging sites are often set to noindex or blocked in robots.txt. If that setting goes live, Google drops the pages. Note that Google can only see a noindex rule if robots.txt does not block the page (Google Search Central), so check both.
2. Test redirects. Take 20 old URLs from your top pages and open each one. Each should land on the right new page in one step, not on the home page or a 404.
3. Submit the new sitemap in Search Console. If the domain changed, use the Change of Address tool, as Google's site-move guide describes.
4. Submit every form again on the live domain.
5. Check analytics is recording visits and conversions on the live site.
6. Open the site on a phone over mobile data and check the home page, a service page and the contact page.

What should you check 30 days after launch?

• Search Console page indexing and 404s. Fix any old URL that now returns an error.
• Search performance. Compare clicks and impressions with your baseline. Google says rankings can fluctuate while it recrawls and that it "can take a few weeks or more" for new URLs to replace old ones on a medium-sized site (Google Search Central). A dip in week one is normal. A steady fall for a specific page usually points to a missing redirect or a page that lost its key words.
• Enquiries and conversion rate against the 90-day baseline.
• Core Web Vitals from real visitors, once enough data has built up.
• AI answers. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google a handful of real buyer questions and note whether your business is named. Repeat monthly.

What a redesign can't promise

Following every step above protects what you have. It doesn't guarantee higher rankings, more enquiries or a mention in AI answers; those depend on your offer, your competition and how search engines change. Some short-term movement after a launch is normal even when everything is done right. What you can control is not losing ground through avoidable mistakes, and having a baseline to show whether the new site is working. For budgeting, see what a website costs in 2026.

How Project 66 Studio can help

We run redesigns with the inventory, redirect map, speed and accessibility checks, structured data and AI crawler setup built in. A new website or rebuild starts from $799, and care plans after launch are $79, $179 or $549 a month; we confirm the final price before any work begins. See pricing or start a project.

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Questions people ask

Will a website redesign hurt my SEO?

It can, if old URLs break or pages that ranked are deleted or rewritten without their key words. Mapping every old URL to a new one with a 301 redirect and keeping the content that ranks prevents the most common causes of lost traffic. Google says rankings can fluctuate for a few weeks while it recrawls a moved site, which is normal.

How long should I keep 301 redirects after a redesign?

Google's site-move guidance says to keep redirects as long as possible, generally at least one year. Keeping them longer helps visitors who follow old links and bookmarks. Update your own internal links to the new URLs as well.

What Core Web Vitals scores should a new website hit?

Google's "good" thresholds are Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less, and Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less. They are measured at the 75th percentile of page loads, on mobile and desktop separately.

Should I block AI crawlers on my new website?

Decide crawler by crawler. OpenAI says sites that block OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, while blocking GPTBot only opts content out of model training and does not affect search. If you want to be recommended in AI answers, allow the search crawlers and make a separate choice about training.

What should I check 30 days after a website launch?

Check Search Console for 404 errors and indexing problems, compare clicks and impressions with your pre-launch baseline, and compare enquiries and conversion rate. Fix any old URL that returns an error with a redirect. Also ask AI assistants a few real buyer questions to see whether your business is named.

Read next

• We asked 7 AI assistants 41 buyer questions. Here's what decides who gets named
• Is your website ready for ChatGPT? A 10-point check
• How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT, Google AI and other assistants

Sources

1. Site moves with URL changes, Google Search Central (read 26 Oct 2026).
2. Redirects and Google Search, Google Search Central (read 26 Oct 2026).
3. Block Search Indexing with noindex, Google Search Central (read 26 Oct 2026).
4. Performance report (Search results): Overview and basic setup, Google Search Console Help (read 26 Oct 2026).
5. Web Vitals, web.dev (Google) (read 26 Oct 2026).
6. Introduction to structured data markup in Google Search, Google Search Central (read 26 Oct 2026).
7. General structured data guidelines, Google Search Central (read 26 Oct 2026).
8. Overview of OpenAI Crawlers, OpenAI (read 26 Oct 2026).
9. Perplexity Crawlers, Perplexity (read 26 Oct 2026).
10. The WebAIM Million, WebAIM (read 26 Oct 2026).
11. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2, W3C (read 26 Oct 2026).
12. Understanding Success Criterion 2.5.8: Target Size (Minimum), W3C WAI (read 26 Oct 2026).