FARCOM KNOWLEDGE
Website Redesign & SEO Migration Guide
A website redesign changes more than appearance. Content, URLs, analytics, forms, and organic entry pages are assets of the current site. This guide explains how to protect them with a baseline, migration map, and explicit acceptance criteria.
Define the reason for the redesign
Slow publishing, weak mobile usability, unclear services, aging technology, and low conversion are different problems. ‘A more modern look’ is difficult to measure on its own. Name the problem, affected audience, and success signal for every important change before interface design begins.
Create a baseline of the current website
Record pages, URLs, organic entries, important backlinks, analytics events, forms, and current performance. This inventory supports a deliberate decision to keep, merge, rewrite, or remove content and gives the team something meaningful to compare after launch.
- URL inventory and index status
- Pages with organic visits or external links
- Approved content and its owner
- Forms and conversion journeys
- Performance data and technical errors
Resolve content architecture before interface design
Organize new pages around services, products, and audience needs. Every page needs a purpose, primary topic, and useful next step. Decide which legacy content survives or merges before final design so the new interface is not built over a temporary structure.
Build a URL and redirect map
Give every old URL an explicit outcome: retain it, redirect it to a relevant replacement, merge it, or remove it intentionally. Redirects should be direct and topically close; sending every deleted page to the homepage does not preserve relevance. Internal links and canonicals should point to final destinations.
Run pre-launch quality assurance
The staging site should not be indexed accidentally, but it must remain available for controlled review. Titles, descriptions, headings, structured data, images, forms, analytics, sitemap, robots rules, and mobile journeys need verification. A test crawl can reveal broken links and incorrect targets before migration.
Launch, verify, and monitor
After launch, check legacy URL responses, server errors, 404s, form delivery, analytics, and sitemap availability. Short-term fluctuations can happen and rankings cannot be guaranteed; the goal is to reduce risk and find problems quickly. Search Console becomes a key monitoring source after the main domain is connected.
- Verify direct 301 redirects
- Check canonical and hreflang output
- Submit and monitor the sitemap
- Review crawling, indexing, and target queries
- Compare conversion and performance with the baseline