Modernise a website without losing rankings or enquiries

Before moving or deleting a page, inventory indexed URLs, organic entrances, enquiries, backlinks and queries. This evidence decides which content should stay, merge or grow.

A relaunch without a URL and content inventory is guesswork.

The address itself is the most valuable part of your visibility. Everything Google has learned over the years is attached to it. Unless there is a compelling reason against it, the domain stays exactly as it is, even when nothing of the old design survives.

Sometimes a move is still right: a rename, an address nobody can spell out on the phone, or a domain weighed down by old spam links. Then one rule applies: move in a separate step, never together with the relaunch. Get the new site stable on the old address first, then relocate.

When an address changes, the old URL must permanently redirect to the closest relevant new destination. Sending everything to the homepage breaks context.

Build and test the redirect map before launch, including campaign pages and important files.

The map is not an estimate. It comes from three sources: Search Console for the addresses Google knows, analytics for the ones people actually arrive through, and the old sitemap plus a crawl of the existing site for everything else, including pages nothing links to internally any more.

Then every old address gets its own line. Direct matches are quick. The interesting cases are the ones without: content absorbed into a larger page points to that page, and content dropped entirely goes one level up, to the service overview rather than the homepage.

Technical quality and helpful content belong in one launch checklist.

Cutting long service pages blindly removes answers and relevance. Lead with the key point, then structure useful detail, examples and FAQs.

Good content helps people decide and gives search engines enough context.

Immediately test redirects, indexability, sitemaps, forms and analytics. Then monitor crawl errors, rankings, organic entrances and conversions.

A documented baseline makes significant drops easy to trace and fix.

The most common call we get is not before a relaunch but six weeks after one: a new site, far better looking than the old one, and no enquiries. In almost every case it comes down to one of four causes, and all four can still be fixed.

First, missing or blanket redirects. Second, a site left on noindex because the setting came across from staging. Third, content halved during the rebuild, which removes the answers it used to be found for. Fourth, tracking that no longer counts anything, so enquiries arrive but show up in no report.

The sooner this surfaces, the less of it sticks. After two or three months the way back is longer, but it is not closed.