Website redesign SEO: a checklist for B2B SaaS teams, from the URL map to day 90.

Does a website redesign hurt SEO?

It can, when URLs change without 301 redirects, top pages lose their content, internal links break, or new templates load slowly. A redesign that changes the site structure and its URLs is a site move for Google, and Google says rankings may fluctuate while it recrawls and reindexes the site. A small to medium-sized site can take a few weeks for most pages to move in Google's index, and larger sites take longer.

Google also advises planning changes one after the other, not all at the same time. In practice, that means launching the new design and templates first and leaving the copy of your best pages for a second release. If your URLs don't change at all, the redesign isn't a site move, but new templates and copy can still change your search rankings, so the rest of this SEO checklist applies.

What should you record from the current site before the redesign starts?

A baseline, in effect an SEO audit of the current site, that you can compare against after launch. Without one, nobody can tell a normal post-launch dip from a real loss.

• Search performance: clicks and impressions by page and by query from Google Search Console, for as long a period as you can export.
• Conversions: demo requests, sign-ups, and other key events by landing page from your analytics.
• Every URL: a technical SEO crawl of the old site with each page's title, meta description, canonical, H1, and structured data.
• Links: the pages other sites link to most, so they keep a redirect or a live URL.

From that baseline, mark each page keep, merge, or retire. Keep pages are your top performing pages: they bring search traffic, leads, or links. Merge pages overlap with a stronger page. Retire pages have no audience and no equivalent on the new website.

Which pages and elements should you freeze to protect organic traffic?

Freeze whatever already earns search traffic on the keep pages, and change it later. We hold the copy of top-ranking pages steady at launch and change it in a second release, so a ranking change after launch has one cause, not several.

Navigation, layout, and visual design are where a redesign improves the user experience, so they can change at launch.

Content needs a short freeze, too. We pause content changes on the old site for the last few days before launch, so the final content move and the redirect tests match what's live.

How do you build a redirect map?

List every old URL in one sheet and give each one a single destination before the build starts. Useful columns: old URL, status (keep, merge, or retire), new URL, response code, and a "tested" column for QA.

Rules for each row:

1. Use permanent server-side redirects. Google recommends a permanent server-side redirect whenever possible; 301 and 308 are both permanent.
2. One hop. Send each old URL straight to its final address and avoid redirect chains.
3. Merge with care. Redirecting several old pages to one new page is fine when the new page consolidates their content.
4. Don't send retired pages to the home page. Google says not to redirect many old URLs to one irrelevant destination, which it can treat as a soft 404. If a page has no equivalent, let its URL return a 404 or 410.
5. Keep the redirects. Google says to keep them for as long as possible, generally at least 1 year.

On Webflow, redirects live under Site settings, then Publishing, then 301 redirects, and they need a paid Site plan or a paid Workspace plan. A capture group such as (.*) in the old path, with %1 in the new one, redirects a whole folder when its URL structure changes; put specific rules above broad ones, because order matters. Webflow has no hard limit but recommends keeping the total to about 1,000 as a best practice. A CSV import overwrites all existing redirects, so export the current list first. Redirects take effect when you publish. Our WordPress to Webflow migration guide covers the import step by step.

The Change of Address tool in Search Console is only for moving to a new domain or subdomain. Google says not to use it for path changes within the same site, for a move from http to https, or for www changes.

What should you test before and on launch day?

Test on a staging site that search engines can't index, then test again on the redesigned site once it's live. Webflow lets you keep the webflow.io staging site out of search results by disabling search engine indexing for it.

Before launch, on staging:

• every template has a title, a meta description, and a self-referencing canonical that uses the new URL;
• internal links point to new URLs, not to redirects;
• hreflang annotations, if you have them, use the new URLs;
• every row in the redirect map returns the expected code in one hop;
• there are no broken internal links, and page speed, Core Web Vitals, and mobile usability are checked on the key templates;
• you have a list of every noindex rule used during development, so you can remove each one at launch.

On launch day:

• publish, then check robots.txt and a sample of pages on the live domain for leftover blocks or noindex tags;
• run the whole redirect map against production;
• submit the updated XML sitemap in Google Search Console;
• if DNS changes, lower the TTL at least one full TTL period ahead, as Webflow recommends.

What should you monitor in the 90 days after launch?

Google Search Console, your analytics, and the redirect map, with a check-in at each stage while search engines recrawl the site. Google says that after a move, sitemaps for old URLs should show fewer indexed pages while those for new URLs grow, search reports should start showing new URLs, and the indexing report should be checked regularly for unexpected crawl errors.

For the first weeks we check Search Console coverage, 404 errors, and the keep pages daily, and we agree before launch on how much fluctuation counts as normal. If a keep page is still well below its baseline after six weeks, compare its old and new versions before you change anything else.

We run website redesigns and migrations for B2B and SaaS companies, so we have an interest in the topic. For how we run one end to end, see our website redesign page.

Questions about SEO in a website redesign