Most people rebuild a website because the old one embarrasses them. The design is dated, it falls apart on a phone, and nobody remembers the login. Those are good reasons. But the old site has been quietly earning things for years: pages Google already knows about, links from other websites, bookmarks, and the website link on your Google Business Profile. A rebuild is the easiest moment to throw all of that away by accident.
The good news is that keeping it is not complicated. Google publishes its own guide to changing the addresses of a site's pages, which it calls a site move. Here is what it says, in plain language, and the order I would do it in.
Why a rebuild can cost you traffic
Every page on your site lives at an address. When a rebuild changes those addresses, and it usually does, the old ones stop working unless somebody tells them where to go. A customer clicks your listing in Google, lands on a page that says not found, and leaves. Google has to rediscover everything from scratch. None of that is a penalty. It is just what happens when a page disappears without a forwarding address.
Step 1: List every page the old site has
Before anything changes, make a list of the old addresses. Google suggests starting with the important ones: the pages in your sitemap, the pages your analytics say get the most visits, and the pages other sites link to, which Search Console shows you in its links report.
Do not forget the files. Google specifically calls out images and downloads such as PDFs, because they may already be getting traffic from Search or from links. A menu PDF or a price sheet that customers find on Google is a page too.
Step 2: Decide where each old page goes
Next to each old address, write the new page that replaces it. Most will be obvious: the old services page becomes the new services page. For anything you are deliberately not bringing over, Google says the old address should honestly return a not found or gone response rather than being pointed somewhere that does not match.
Step 3: Send every old address to its new page
This is the step that protects your traffic. Google recommends a permanent redirect on the server, a 301 or a 308, from each old address to its new one. Set up that way, a visitor or a search engine that asks for the old page is sent straight to the new one, automatically.
People worry that redirects cost them ranking. Google is direct about this: 301 and other permanent redirects do not cause a loss in PageRank. The one thing to avoid is a chain, where page one sends you to page two, which sends you to page three. Point each old address straight at its final destination.
Step 4: Check the new site before it goes live
- Remove the development blocks. Plenty of sites are built with a noindex tag or a robots.txt rule that keeps Google out while they are unfinished. Google's guide says to plan for removing those at launch. Forget one and the new site can stay out of Google entirely.
- Point every page at itself. Each new page should carry a canonical tag naming its own new address.
- Update your own links. The links inside the new site should go directly to the new addresses, not through a redirect.
- Keep Search Console connected. If your site is verified with a file or a tag, make sure the new site still carries it.
Step 5: Launch, then watch
After launch, submit the new sitemap in Search Console and spot check a few old addresses with the URL Inspection tool to confirm they land where they should. Then give it time. Google says a small to medium site can take a few weeks for most pages to move in its index, and that some ranking fluctuation while it recrawls is normal.
Keep the redirects in place for a long time. Google's guidance is generally at least a year, and from a visitor's point of view it suggests considering keeping them indefinitely, because old links and bookmarks never fully go away.
Update the links you control
Google's guide lists these separately, and they are the ones small businesses forget: your profile links on Facebook and elsewhere, and any ad campaigns pointing at old landing pages. For a local business, add the website link on your Google Business Profile to that list. It is often the single most clicked link to your site.
Change one thing at a time
If you are changing your domain name, your platform and your design, Google recommends doing them one after another rather than all at once. When something goes wrong, you will know which change caused it.
If the domain name itself is changing, there is one more step. Google asks you to submit a Change of Address in Search Console for the old site. You only need it for a move to a different domain, not for a redesign that keeps the same address.
How we handle it
When we moved this site to a new domain in September, every old address was set to redirect to the same page on the new one, the same way this guide describes. You can see some of the rebuilds we have done on our Real Clients page. If you are planning a rebuild and want to know what your current site has earned before you touch it, get in touch and we will look.