A new website should not cost you the traffic the old one earned. Most ranking drops after a relaunch come from a handful of avoidable mistakes.
Before you touch the design
Crawl the current site and export every URL that has traffic, links or rankings. That list is the most valuable document in the project.
The redirect map
- Match every old URL to its closest new page — not to the homepage.
- Use permanent (301) redirects and avoid chains.
- Keep titles and headings for top pages close to the originals.
- Test every redirect on staging before launch day.
Redirect to the closest match, never to the homepage. Search engines notice the difference.
The first thirty days
Submit the new sitemap, watch crawl errors daily for the first week and compare rankings for your top fifty pages each Monday. Small dips are normal; anything that stays down after three weeks gets investigated.