Website Relaunch without SEO losses

A relaunch is not a decision to take lightly. An outdated website creates costs — through poor conversion, high bounce rates, and weak Google rankings. But a poorly planned relaunch can make these problems even worse. Clear signals for a relaunch: - The website loads slowly (LCP over 3 seconds) - The design hasn't been updated in more than 3 years - Google rankings are stagnating or dropping - The bounce rate is above 70% - The CMS is hard to use or outdated - The website is not GDPR-compliant - Mobile users have a poor experience

Audit of the old website Before you write a single line of new code, fully analyse the old website: Which pages have organic traffic? Which URLs rank for important keywords? Which pages convert? Tools: Google Search Console, Ahrefs/SEMrush for URL analysis, Google Analytics for conversion data. Define goals What should the relaunch achieve? More leads? Higher conversion rate? Easier content management? Without clear goals, there are no success criteria. Lock in the technology stack The next steps depend heavily on whether you're replacing WordPress with Next.js or just swapping a template. A technology change is more effort but pays off more in the long run.

Create a redirect map For every old URL that changes, a 301 redirect must be set up. A redirect map is a document with two columns: old URL → new URL. Review structured data Schema.org markup, Open Graph tags, and Twitter Cards should be carried over to the new system. Structured data improves click-through rates in search results. Improve content quality A relaunch is the best opportunity to clean up content: remove outdated pages, consolidate duplicate content, upgrade weak content. Canonical tags and hreflang For multilingual websites: implement hreflang attributes correctly so Google serves the right language to the right region.

The golden rule of a relaunch: always develop on a staging environment, never directly on the live website. Set up the staging environment The new website runs on a separate domain (e.g. staging.your-domain.com) and is not indexed by search engines (noindex header). Parallel operation The old website stays live while the new one is being built. No revenue lost to maintenance pages. Content migration Text, images, and documents are transferred from the old to the new website — manually or automated depending on scope. Cross-browser and mobile testing Test on real iOS and Android devices as well as on Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. Browser emulators are not enough.

Go-live checklist Before launch: All redirects active? Metadata carried over? Sitemap updated? Google Search Console reconnected? Analytics tracking configured? GDPR compliance verified? DNS switch The actual switch takes only a few minutes: redirect the DNS record to the new server IP, activate the HTTPS certificate. Immediate monitoring (first 72 hours) Monitor intensively during the first 3 days after the relaunch: error messages in Google Search Console, 404 errors in server logs, ranking changes, conversion rate comparison. Resubmit to Google Search Console Submit the sitemap to Google Search Console after launch. Google needs to re-crawl the new site structure.