1 min readWeb DevelopmentBy ELLEXOR Team
A redesign should grow your traffic, not wipe it out. Use this SEO checklist before, during and after launch to protect and improve your rankings.
A new website is exciting, but launches done without an SEO plan can lose years of search visibility overnight. This checklist is the same one our team uses on every website development project.
Before you redesign
- Crawl the current site and export every URL, title, description and H1.
- Record your baseline – organic traffic, top pages and top keywords from Search Console.
- Identify your best content and make sure it has a home on the new site.
During the build
- Map every old URL to a new one and plan 301 redirects — one hop, no chains.
- Write unique titles and meta descriptions for every page.
- Use one H1 per page and a logical heading hierarchy.
- Add structured data such as Organization, LocalBusiness, BreadcrumbList, Article and FAQPage.
- Optimise images with modern formats, correct sizes and descriptive alt text.
- Hit Core Web Vitals targets: LCP under 2.5s, INP under 200ms and CLS under 0.1.
- Keep staging out of Google with noindex — and remove it at launch.
At launch
- Deploy redirects, then test a sample of old URLs.
- Submit the new XML sitemap in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
- Check robots.txt, canonical tags and that no page is accidentally noindexed.
After launch
Monitor Search Console daily for the first two weeks, fix any 404s quickly and compare traffic against your baseline. Then keep growing with fresh content and ongoing SEO.
Planning a redesign? Get in touch and we’ll review your current site’s SEO before you start.
Frequently asked questions
It doesn’t have to. Most ranking losses come from missing redirects, lost content and accidental noindex tags. Planning redirects and keeping your best content protects rankings.
Need help putting this into practice?
Tell us about your goals — we’ll explain the most practical next steps.
