A new website can easily wipe out your old search rankings if the old URLs disappear overnight. Here's how to move so that both traffic and analytics survive, and what we learned from moving our own site.
Where do rankings get lost?
Google ranks URLs, not companies. If the old URLs start returning 404 errors overnight, Google forgets them, and with them the value of the links pointing to them. Most traffic loss isn't caused by the design but by a missing redirect map.
Steps of a redesign
- Inventory: collect every URL of the old site (sitemap, Search Console, Analytics) and mark which ones bring traffic or links.
- Redirect map: next to each old URL, write the best-matching new URL. Don't send everything to the home page: Google treats that as an error.
- Staging locked: keep the staging site out of search engines (noindex, robots.txt), or it competes with the live site as duplicate content.
- Content basics: unique page titles and descriptions, structured data, a new sitemap.
- Launch: DNS switch, redirect old domains and the www version to one main address, check the certificate.
- Notify: submit the new sitemap in Search Console and request indexing of the key pages.
- Follow-up: for the first 4–6 weeks, check 404 errors and traffic weekly, and add any missing redirects.
Don't break your analytics
If the new site measures into a new Analytics property, you lose your baseline for comparison. In our own redesign we kept measuring in the old property, so we can see what the new site delivers. Set up enquiries, email and phone clicks as key events before launch.
A real example: moving skvad.com
We launched the new skvad.com in November 2026. The staging site was kept out of search engines throughout, and at launch a single switch let the crawlers in. Our other domains (skvaddigital.com, skvad.hu, skvaddigital.hu, skvad.digital) permanently redirect to skvad.com, and measurement continued in the existing Analytics property.
Updated: 11 November 2026
