Redesigning your website without losing your Google rankings

If you’ve found your business on Google before, even now and then, the thought of a new website is a bit frightening as well as exciting. What if the new site drops off the map and that trickle of enquiries dries up with it?

The honest answer is that a redesign can cause a wobble. Google itself says so: when a site moves and its page addresses change, “the visibility of your content in Search may fluctuate temporarily during the move,” and for a medium-sized site it “can take a few weeks or more” before Google settles on showing the new pages (Google Search Central). That wobble is normal, and Google says rankings settle down over time.

What actually protects your position is a handful of unglamorous, checkable things. Here they are.

What actually matters to Google

The thing that matters most is whether you keep the web address you already have. If your business is at yourbusiness.co.uk now, staying on yourbusiness.co.uk with a new look changes far less than moving to a brand new domain.

If any individual page addresses do change (a service page moving from /plumbing.html to /services/plumbing/, say), each old address needs to point straight at its new one. Google calls this a permanent redirect and describes it as “the best way to ensure that Google Search and people are directed to the correct page” (Google Search Central). It also recommends keeping those redirects in place “for as long as possible, generally at least 1 year” (Google Search Central), so it’s a job that stays done long after launch day.

The words on the page matter too. If a page already brings in visits for “boiler repairs Wrexham” or “wedding hair Chester”, the safest move is to keep that wording somewhere in the new version rather than rewriting it from scratch for the sake of a fresh look. A new design doesn’t need new sentences on every page.

Your web address and email

Your domain name should belong to you, registered in your name, separately from whoever builds or hosts your website. It’s worth checking that before you start, because some designers register domains in their own name. As long as it’s yours, a redesign doesn’t change who owns it.

Google’s own guidance treats moving to a different domain and staying on the same one as two different jobs, and its Change of Address tool is only needed for the first (Google Search Central, Google Search Central). If you keep your existing web address, you skip that step entirely.

Email is the part people forget. Your business email often runs on a completely separate system from your website, even if you set them both up at the same time years ago through the same provider. Before we move anything, we check how your email is set up, so the switch doesn’t accidentally break the inbox your customers already use.

Your old content

If your current site is on WordPress, there’s a built in export under Tools, which bundles up your posts, pages, comments, categories and tags into one file. It’s useful for keeping an archive or bringing your writing across to a new build (WordPress.org).

Squarespace is more limited. Its export is built for moving into WordPress, and it leaves things out: video and audio blocks, product listings, drafts, custom styling, and any page-specific headers, footers or sidebars. Only one blog gets exported. Squarespace also warns that WordPress may only pull in links to your existing images rather than copying them, so if you switch off the old Squarespace site too soon, those images can break (Squarespace support). The safe order is to save your images and text somewhere of your own first, then switch the old site off once the new one is live and checked.

If you built your own site through a general website builder, there may be no proper export at all, so check well before you plan to switch anything off. We cover more of these traps in our piece on common DIY website mistakes.

What to expect afterwards

Expect a few weeks where your position on Google moves about a bit while it works out what has changed. That’s the settling period Google describes, and it passes.

You can help it along. Google suggests submitting an updated list of your website’s pages through Search Console after a move, which gives it a clear map of what to look at rather than waiting for it to stumble across the new pages on its own.

A short checklist for any designer

Whoever builds your new site, whether that’s us or someone else, these are worth asking about directly:

• Are we keeping the same web address, or moving to a new one?
• Is the domain registered in my name?
• Will every old page address be pointed at its new one, and kept that way for at least a year?
• Has anyone checked how the email is set up before anything changes?
• Is the wording that already works on each page being kept?
• Have the old content and images been saved before the old site is switched off?
• Will the updated page list be sent to Google once the new site is live?

Where we come in

We build for businesses from Chester to Northwich and right across North Wales, and this is part of the website design and build work we do for anyone moving off an old WordPress, Squarespace or DIY site. You keep your web address, we point each old page at its new home, and we check your email setup before anything moves. Once it’s live, we make the changes for you afterwards too, so there’s nothing new for you to log in to or learn.

If you’re still weighing up whether to leave WordPress or Squarespace, our comparison of WordPress vs Squarespace for small businesses is worth a read first. Our pricing page sets out what a new site costs, and if you’d rather just talk it through, get in touch and tell us what you’re working with now.