- Rankings that vanish after a redesign often come from old URLs that now return 404, or from changed content on pages that used to rank.
- Before design starts, count every URL and decide for each one whether to keep it, forward it with a 301 or close it with a 410.
- The staging site needs a password and noindex, and the noindex has to come off on launch day.
- After launch, rankings can move around for several weeks. Check the Search Console reports every week until they settle.
Why rankings drop after a new website launches
Move offices without leaving a forwarding address, and old customers still walk to the old building, find an empty room and go to someone else. A new website that doesn't forward its old URLs works the same way. Google knows your site page by page. If the old address is empty, the ranking that page earned doesn't follow it to the new one.
| Symptom | Common cause | Where to look in Search Console |
|---|---|---|
| Pages people used to visit drop out of search | The URL changed with no redirect, so the old page returns 404 | Page indexing: Not found (404) |
| The whole site drops out of search | noindex from the staging site carried over to the live site | Page indexing: Excluded by 'noindex' tag |
| Same URL, but rankings fall | The title and content changed so much that the words people search for are gone | Performance: compare date ranges, filter by page |
| Hundreds of old pages vanish at once | Every page redirected to the home page, which Google treats as a soft 404 | Page indexing: Soft 404 |
| Thai users see the English page | Incomplete hreflang pairs, or the site switches language by IP | URL Inspection for that page |
Before design starts, count every URL you have
A site that has been around for years usually has more URLs than anyone remembers: old news, PDF brochures, promotion pages long forgotten. Some of them still get visitors from Google every month.
Build the list from the old site's XML sitemap, a crawler that follows every link, the Pages tab of the Performance report (which goes back 16 months), landing pages in Analytics, and the Links report, which shows the pages other sites link to.
Then pull out the pages to protect: pages with clicks from Google in the last 12 months, pages other sites link to, and links your sales team regularly sends customers, such as spec PDFs. Hand this list to whoever builds the site when you ask for a quote. Other questions to ask are in how to choose a web development company or software house. If you're not sure which pages the new site should have, start with what a company website needs.
The URL map: a table that keeps important pages from disappearing
A URL map is a table with the old URLs on the left and what happens to each one on the right. Designers, content writers and developers all work from the same table.
URL map
- Step 1 Put every old URL in the table including PDFs that people link to, with 12 months of clicks from Search Console.
- Step 2 Decide row by row Keep the URL, forward it with a 301, or close it with a 410. Wherever you can keep the old URL, that is the lowest risk.
- Step 3 Map one to one Each old URL points to the new page that answers the same question, never to the home page.
- Step 4 Lock the content of protected pages The look can change, but the title, the main heading and what the page answers stay.
- Step 5 Test on the staging site Run every old URL and check that it gets a single 301 to the right page.
- Step 6 Keep redirects for at least a year as Google recommends. Links in old emails keep bringing people in for a long time.
For a site of a few hundred pages, the map takes a few days, and it belongs in the scope from the quote onward. How this and other work moves the budget is in what website and app development costs depend on.
301, 302, 410 and canonical: what each one is for
A 301 is a permanent change-of-address notice, a 302 is a temporary one, and a 410 says the page is closed.
Use 301 for a new site (or 308, which is also permanent). A 302 tells Google the move is temporary, so Google may keep the old URL in search results. Many servers default to 302, so check the status code you actually get. For pages with no new content to take over, such as finished promotions, use 410. Both 404 and 410 get a page dropped from search results, but 410 says more clearly that the removal is deliberate. Redirecting pages that have no match to the home page tends to be treated by Google as a soft 404.
A canonical is a hint about which URL is the main version. Google takes it into account but doesn't always follow it. Give every page a canonical that points to itself on the live domain, and check that none still points to the staging site.
For the development team · Redirects Google reads correctly
Set redirects on the server with 301 or 308, and use JavaScript or meta refresh only when a server-side redirect isn't possible. Apache's Redirect directive without a status and Express's res.redirect() both default to 302, so specify 301 explicitly. Googlebot follows up to 10 redirect hops, but each old URL should reach its destination in one hop. If the site has been moved before, update the older redirects so they point to the new destinations too. Test with a script that reads the URL map and runs curl -sI on every row. Search Console's Change of Address tool is only for a change of domain.
Multilingual sites and the staging site
hreflang has to point both ways
Each page has to tell Google where its other language versions are, itself included, and every language has to point back. If the Thai page points to the English page but the English page doesn't point back, Google ignores that pair. Add x-default for visitors who match no listed language, and don't switch languages automatically by IP, because Googlebot crawls mostly from the United States. For five languages on one site, see our multilingual corporate website development page.
Lock the staging site twice
A staging site needs both a password and noindex. robots.txt alone isn't enough: a blocked URL can still be indexed if something links to it, and Google never sees the noindex on a page it isn't allowed to crawl. The bigger risk comes on launch day, when the noindex carries over to the entire live site.
Launch day checklist
Pick a day when the whole team is in, and not a Friday evening, then work down the list in order.
Before you go live, and in the first hour after
- Remove the staging noindex and password, then view the home page source again
- robots.txt doesn't block the whole site
- Redirects work for every protected page
- canonical and hreflang point to the live domain, with no trace of the staging host
- Submit the new XML sitemap in Search Console
- Request indexing for five to ten key pages through URL Inspection (there is a daily quota)
- Analytics, the cookie banner and every form work
- Links in social profiles, email signatures and PDFs point to the new URLs
Hypothetical case
A rooftop solar installer in Chonburi (name and figures invented) rebuilt its whole website. The old site had 180 URLs. Of these, 22 pages had clicks from Google in the last 12 months, and 5 had links from other sites.
The team kept the old URLs for the service pages, sent 90 old news pages to the same stories on the new site with 301s, and closed 40 finished promotion pages with 410s. All 22 protected pages changed only their look.
In the first two weeks, clicks from Google fell by about a fifth. The Page indexing report showed 9 spec PDFs returning 404. They weren't in the old sitemap, but the sales team had been emailing the links to customers. The team added redirects that day, and clicks were back close to their old level around week six.
After launch: what to watch in Search Console
Google's site move guide says rankings may fluctuate for a while, and a medium-sized site can take several weeks. The job after launch is telling normal movement apart from pages lost to a setup mistake.
In the Page indexing report, a rising count under Page with redirect is normal for old URLs that now forward. The ones to check quickly are Not found (404), Soft 404 and Excluded by 'noindex' tag. In the Performance report, compare the periods before and after launch, filter by page, and see whether protected pages still get clicks.
For the development team · A six-week watch schedule
In the first three days, search the server logs for 404s and add the missing redirects. In week one, check Page indexing daily; from week two to week six, check it weekly. Compare Performance with a page filter using a regex such as ^https://example.com/th/services/. If a protected page loses more than half its clicks for over two weeks, use URL Inspection to see which canonical Google chose.
Before drawing the home page, we listen to how the old site works for the business
An old site that looks dated is often still doing some work. Customers find certain service pages through search, sales sends PDF links to customers every week, and HR takes applications through the careers page. DNA Maker talks to these people before design starts and turns what we hear into a URL map, redirect rules and a list of pages whose content must not change. The new screens come after that.
Our team in Bangkok designs and builds everything ourselves, with no subcontracting. SEO structure is planned from the wireframe stage, the site supports up to five languages with hreflang, we review analytics with you every month after launch, and the source code and CMS belong to you. We don't guarantee rankings, because nobody controls Google. Details are on our multilingual company website development page, and other kinds of sites are under web development.
SOFTWARE ENGINEERING GLOSSARY
Software engineering glossary
| Term | What it is | A simple example | What executives should ask the development team |
|---|---|---|---|
| 301 Redirect | A status saying the page has moved permanently | A 2019 news story forwarded to the same story on the new site | Does every old URL in the map get a single 301? |
| 410 Gone | A status saying the page has been removed and won't return | A promotion page for an offer that has ended | Which pages are we closing on purpose, and who approved it? |
| Soft 404 | A page that loads, but Google sees no real content on it | Every old URL redirected to the home page | How many soft 404s are there? |
| Canonical Tag | A tag telling Google which URL is the main version | A product page with several filter URLs pointing to one main page | Does any page still point to the staging site? |
| Hreflang | A tag saying where this page is in other languages | Thai and English service pages pointing to each other | Does every language point back to the others? |
| Noindex | An instruction telling Google not to keep the page in search results | Set across the whole staging site | Who removes it on launch day, and when is it checked again? |