What should I audit before starting a website redesign?

Crawl every URL, export your top pages by organic traffic over the last 12 months, export keywords, rankings and backlinks, and document on-page SEO for important pages. Then screenshot a traffic and rankings baseline the week before launch and list every form, integration and tracking tag.

Should I keep the same URLs when I redesign my website?

Wherever you reasonably can. Every URL that changes is a redirect you have to build, so keeping URLs identical is the lowest-risk path.

Is a redesign a good time to delete old pages and blog posts?

Yes. Map old content to new and decide which pages survive, which get merged and which get killed. A redesign is the best content cleanup opportunity you will get, so use it to remove thin pages that bring nothing.

What should I test on staging before a website relaunch?

Click every internal link, test every redirect from the map, check the site on mobile, tablet and desktop and in several browsers, and proofread. Also test page speed and Core Web Vitals on real pages, confirm tracking events fire and run every form end to end.

What is the best day of the week to launch a redesigned website?

Early in the week, not before a weekend, so the team is around to catch problems. Put all 301 redirects live at go-live, submit the new sitemap in Search Console straight away and request indexing of your most important pages.

Why is organic traffic still down weeks after a redesign?

A small dip in week one is normal, but one that does not recover within a few weeks means something is broken, usually a redirect gap. Re-crawl the live site, check the Search Console Coverage report for unexpected 404s and fix the missing redirects fast.

WordPress Redesign and Migration Checklist

Most redesign disasters aren’t design problems. They’re checklist problems. The new site looks great, everyone’s happy on launch day, and three weeks later organic traffic is down a third and nobody knows why. I’ve seen it happen to good teams with good designers, and almost every time the cause is the same: something on the technical checklist got skipped because it wasn’t glamorous.

This is the checklist we work through at DesignMe when we redesign or migrate a site. It’s deliberately boring. Boring is what protects your traffic. Work through it in order and a redesign should cost you nothing in rankings, and usually improve them.

I’ll say this up front because we learned it the hard way on our own relaunch: we took a measurable traffic dip in the first weeks after relaunching our site, traced it to redirect gaps in Ahrefs, and recovered it with a proper 301 map. The checklist below exists so that doesn’t happen to you.

Phase 1: Before You Touch Anything (The Audit)

This phase is the insurance policy. Skip it and you’re flying blind.

Crawl the entire current site with Screaming Frog or Ahrefs Site Audit. Export every URL, pages, posts, category and tag archives, PDFs, everything. Our free migration planner gives you a first list from your sitemap, with the URLs that need a 301.
Export top pages by organic traffic from Google Search Console (last 12 months). This is your protection list, the pages you cannot disturb.
Export top keywords and rankings from Ahrefs and Search Console. Know what you rank for and where, so you can spot movement after launch.
Pull your backlink profile. Identify which specific URLs have external links. A page with referring domains is carrying authority that must be preserved at that exact URL or redirected cleanly.
Document on-page SEO for every important page: title tag, meta description, H1, and any structured data. You’ll reproduce these on the new site.
Screenshot a traffic and rankings baseline the week before launch. If something moves, you need to know what “before” looked like.
Inventory all forms, integrations, and tracking: analytics, pixels, CRM connections, marketing automation. These break silently if you don’t list them.

Phase 2: Planning the New Site

Decide your URL structure. Will URLs stay the same or change? Every change is a redirect you’ll have to build. Keep URLs identical wherever you reasonably can, it’s the lowest-risk path.
Map old content to new. Which pages survive as-is, which get merged, which get killed. A redesign is the best content cleanup opportunity you’ll ever get, use it to remove thin pages that bring nothing.
Plan your CMS structure: content types, collections, fields. Decide SEO title and description fields now, before importing content.
Define the design system first: typography, colour, spacing, components. Build pages from the system, not page by page. This is what keeps the site consistent and editable afterward.
Set your platform. If you’re still deciding, see WordPress to Webflow or Framer: which path is right for you.

Phase 3: Building the Redirect Map (Non-Negotiable)

This single document protects your traffic more than anything else on the list.

List every old URL from your crawl.
Assign each a destination: same URL (no redirect), new URL (301 to the new location), or retired (301 to the closest relevant surviving page).
Never blanket-redirect dead pages to the homepage. Google treats it as a soft 404 and passes almost no authority. Redirect to the nearest relevant page instead.
Check for redirect chains: old URL → intermediate → final. Collapse them to a single hop.
Build it as a spreadsheet with three columns: old URL, new URL, redirect type. Review it line by line.

Phase 4: Reproducing SEO on the New Site

Carry over every title tag and meta description from your audit.
Preserve heading structure: one H1 per page, logical H2/H3 hierarchy.
Re-add image alt text. It doesn’t migrate itself.
Rebuild structured data / schema on the pages that had it.
Rebuild internal links. WordPress sites accumulate internal links over years; a clean rebuild often loses them. Internal links are a ranking factor, restore them.

Phase 5: Technical Pre-Launch

Generate a new XML sitemap.
Set canonical tags correctly on every page.
Check robots.txt: make sure you’re not accidentally blocking the new site or leaving it noindexed.
Verify the new site in Search Console before launch where possible.
Test page speed and Core Web Vitals on staging, on real pages, on mobile.
Re-implement all tracking: analytics, pixels, CRM. Test that events actually fire.
Test every form end to end. A broken contact form on a B2B site is lost revenue, not just lost UX.

Phase 6: QA on Staging

Click every internal link. Every one.
Test every redirect from the map, old URL should land on the right new page.
Check the site on mobile, tablet, and desktop.
Proofread. Migrations introduce copy errors more often than you’d think.
Test in multiple browsers.

Phase 7: Launch

Launch early in the week, not before a weekend, so you’re around to catch problems.
Implement all 301 redirects at go-live.
Submit the new sitemap in Search Console immediately.
Request indexing of your most important pages.

Phase 8: The First Month (Where Migrations Are Won or Lost)

The work isn’t done at launch. This phase is where you save or sink the redesign.

Monitor organic traffic daily against your pre-launch baseline.
Watch the Search Console Coverage report for crawl errors and unexpected 404s.
Re-crawl the live site after a few days to catch missed redirects or broken links.
Track keyword rankings for your priority terms.
Expect a small dip in week one as Google re-crawls and re-indexes, that’s normal. A dip that doesn’t recover within a few weeks means something’s broken, usually a redirect gap. Find it fast.

Signal in the first month	What it usually means	What to do
A small dip in week one	Google is re-crawling and re-indexing	Normal: keep monitoring daily
A dip that doesn’t recover within a few weeks	Something’s broken, usually a redirect gap	Re-crawl the live site and find it fast
Unexpected 404s in the Coverage report	Missed redirects or broken links	Fix the missing redirects fast

The Honest Truth About Checklists

None of this is clever. It’s discipline. The teams that lose traffic in a redesign aren’t the ones who lack talent, they’re the ones who treated SEO as a launch-day task instead of a pre-launch discipline. By the time you launch, every protection on this list should already be built and tested.

Phases 1 to 6 happen before launch day. By go-live, every protection should already be built and tested.

If you want the platform-specific versions of this process, see the WordPress to Webflow migration guide and the WordPress to Framer migration guide. And for the deeper dive on protecting rankings specifically, how to migrate from WordPress without losing SEO goes further on the search side.

DesignMe redesigns and migrates websites for funded B2B SaaS and AI companies, with SEO preservation built into the process from the first audit. If you’re planning a redesign and can’t afford to lose traffic, our intro call is 30 minutes and we’ll tell you honestly what the project actually involves:

designme.agency/intro