Most advice about protecting your rankings through a website redesign is correct and useless in equal measure. Keep your title tags. Set up your 301s. Submit your sitemap. All true. None of it tells you what actually happens when you do all of that and things still go sideways for a month.
We have now rebuilt two sites in quick succession: our own, and Denver PPC, which relaunched on 3 September 2026. Denver PPC is a sister company — same owner, separate business — which is why we can show this much of the inside. Both rebuilds were done carefully by people who do this for a living. Both still produced surprises. This is what they were, with the numbers from Google Search Console rather than from memory.
1. Google keeps your old URLs far longer than you expect
When we restructured our own site, we moved pages to cleaner addresses — /search-engine-optimization/local-seo/ became /local-seo/, and so on — and set up 254 redirect rules to carry the old addresses across. Every redirect works. Type an old URL and you land on the new page.
Google did not follow. Weeks later, almost every keyword we rank for is still attributed to the old URL. Our Local SEO hub — a main service page, linked from the navigation on every page, present in three sitemaps — showed Last crawl: N/A in Search Console. Google knew it existed and had never once fetched it.
The crawl statistics explained why. Over 90 days Googlebot made about 2,700 requests to our 44-page site, which sounds like plenty. But 94% of those were refresh crawls — re-checking pages it already knew, meaning the old ones — and only 6% were discovery. Roughly 160 requests in three months to find anything new, on a site that had just changed every address and added nine pages.
What fixed it: requesting indexing manually, one URL at a time, in Search Console. One of our new pages went from “Discovered — currently not indexed” to “Page is indexed” in about four minutes. The pages were never the problem. Google’s schedule was.
2. Redirects that work for people and fail for your ads
This one cost real money and we did it twice.
Redirect rules can be set to match a URL exactly, or to match it and pass along whatever query string is attached. Ours were set to match exactly. So when someone clicked an ad, an email link or a social post pointing at an old URL, the click arrived carrying a tracking tag — ?gclid=…, ?utm_source=…, ?fbclid=… — and the exact-match rule did not recognise it. Those visitors got a 404. Organic visitors, whose clicks carry no tag, sailed through.
The failure was invisible in the obvious place. Test the redirect yourself and it works. Only paid and email traffic broke — the traffic you are paying for. We switched all 254 rules to pass query strings, and forwarding the tags also restored attribution, so the lead is credited to the campaign that produced it.
A couple of weeks later we added one new rule for a retired offer page and set it to exact match again, out of habit. Caught it on a routine check. If you take one thing from this article: after a redesign, test your redirects with a tracking parameter attached, not just the bare URL.
3. Pages you had forgotten about were carrying weight
Denver PPC’s old site had an eighteen-year archive: 157 blog posts, 61 of them written in 2008 and 2009, two since 2024. The rebuild let most of that go. Before calling that a loss we checked every URL against Semrush — and apart from one, they carried zero keywords and zero traffic. Pruning them cost nothing.
The one exception was a page called What is white label PPC? It ranked for 52 keywords, including “white label PPC services” at position 10 — a commercial term with 880 searches a month. It returned a 404 on launch morning. We rebuilt it on the same URL within a day, longer and better than the original, and because Google had not yet dropped the old version from its index, the 52 keywords were never actually lost.
Three more old addresses — a resources page, a campaign guide, an outsourcing page — carried a handful of keywords each and had no redirect. Fixed the same week. The lesson is not “never prune.” It is: pull the keyword list for every URL you are about to retire, before you retire it. Ten minutes of checking finds the one page in a hundred that matters.
4. The things that break are not always SEO
Two things were wrong on Denver PPC’s site the morning after launch that had nothing to do with rankings and everything to do with revenue.
First, the entire new site was serving noindex, nofollow with no canonical tags — a staging setting that had come across with the build. Caught and fixed by 12:30 that day. Left for a week, Google would have started dropping pages.
Second, and quieter: the old site had call tracking. The new one did not. The script simply was not carried over. Analytics survived the rebuild; call attribution did not — so paid campaigns were running to a site that could not tell you which campaign made the phone ring. Two days of paid traffic with no call data before it was noticed and restored.
Neither of these shows up in a rankings report. Both show up on the invoice.
5. Server errors that only Google can see
For most of the summer, about 15% of every request Googlebot made to our site returned a server error. Nearly 400 errors in total. Not one of them was reproducible by a person — every page loaded fine in a browser, and Google’s own live test fetched pages successfully when we ran it.
We still do not know what caused it. It stopped on its own around 13 August. But a sustained error rate like that is exactly the signal Google uses to slow down how often it visits a site — and a site being visited less is a site whose new pages wait longer to be found. It is the most likely reason our discovery crawl was so thin in point 1.
The only place this was visible was Search Console → Settings → Crawl stats. If you are not looking there after a redesign, you are not looking.
Why this matters more for local rankings
Everything above hits a local business harder, for one reason: local rankings depend on a small number of pages that Google must be able to find and trust. Your location page. Your service-area pages. The page your Google Business Profile links to. If the hub page that ties them together is sitting uncrawled for a month — as ours was — every page beneath it waits with it.
Add the basics that never change: keep your name, address and phone number identical to the letter across the site, your Business Profile and your citations; make sure your Business Profile’s website link points at a URL that still exists; and do not let the redesign quietly change the page your local schema markup lives on.
The checklist we actually use now
Before launch
- Export every URL on the old site with its keyword count and traffic. Anything above zero gets a redirect or a rebuild, never a 404.
- Map every old URL to exactly one new URL. No chains.
- List every third-party script on the old site — analytics, call tracking, chat, pixels — and confirm each one is in the new build.
Launch day
- Check the robots meta and canonical tags on the live site, logged out, before anything else.
- Test redirects with a tracking parameter attached, not just the bare URL.
- Submit the sitemap in Search Console and request indexing for your ten most important pages by hand.
The first six weeks
- Read Crawl stats weekly. Watch the server-error percentage and the refresh-versus-discovery split.
- Read the Page indexing report weekly. Anything in “Discovered — currently not indexed” that matters gets a manual request.
- Expect your visibility numbers to dip while Google swaps old URLs for new. Ours did. Do not panic, and do not “fix” things that are not broken.
What we would do differently
Honestly: request indexing on the new pages on day one instead of waiting to see whether Google would find them. Test redirects with parameters as a rule, not as a lesson. And open Crawl stats in the first week rather than the seventh. None of that is clever. All of it would have saved about a month.
If you are planning a redesign and want it done by people who have made these mistakes already and written them down, start with a free homepage mockup — we design your new homepage first, in your brand, before you commit to anything. You can read the full story of our own rebuild and the Denver PPC relaunch, or see how we approach website design and redesign and local SEO as one job rather than two.
