The BlogWebsite Redesign SEO Checklist: Retain and Boost RankingsPosted on August 11, 2025August 11, 2025

Redesigning your website can feel like a fresh start—new look, better functionality, and a chance to finally address all those things that have been bugging you. But while it’s exciting, it’s also a time when your SEO can take a serious hit if you’re not careful. The last thing you want is to launch your shiny new site only to see your hard-earned Google rankings disappear. That’s where a solid SEO checklist comes into play.

This guide will walk you through everything you need to maintain your current search visibility—and even improve it—as you redesign your site. So, let’s get started!

Website redesign SEO checklist

Conduct a comprehensive SEO audit

Building a strong foundation with thorough analysis and documentation before starting your website redesign is the first step. A comprehensive SEO audit helps you understand your present position, pinpoint issues, and discover areas for growth. 

Make sure to check the following:

• Your current ranking for key terms
• The website loading speed
• Your most popular pages
• Which pages cause visitors to bounce quickly
• Your backlinks

On-page SEO

Start by examining and recording crucial on-page SEO elements, like:

• Content that is high-quality, distinctive, and beneficial to your target audience
• Detection of thin or redundant content for improvement or removal
• Enhanced meta titles and descriptions with target keywords and character limits
• Easy to read URLs with relevant keywords
• Efficient internal linking to enhance user navigation and distribute link equity 

Off-page SEO

Next, assess external variables that affect the authority of your website.

• Examine your backlink profile using tools like Ahrefs or Moz, paying particular attention to the relevance and quality of linking domains.
• Keep an eye on your brand’s visibility on social media and other channels to assess reputation and engagement.
• Finding areas where you may outperform your competitors can also be aided by comparing the performance of your website. 

Technical SEO

A technical SEO audit analyzes issues that could affect your site’s indexability and crawlability. As part of this process, you should: 

• Examine the technical elements that impact user experience and crawlability.
• Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to test the loading times of your website and fix any problems that are causing it to lag.
• Ensure that your website is fully responsive and offers a top-notch user experience across all platforms.
• Address problems such as blocked resources or broken links and look for crawl failures in Google Search Console. 
• Utilize tools like Screaming Frog to find and fix broken links and eliminate unnecessary redirect chains.

Record current performance metrics

Define precise baseline metrics to monitor the effects of your redesign. You may measure success after launch and create achievable goals by recording these indicators. 

Traffic metrics

• Analyze general organic traffic trends over the previous six to twelve months to get information on your organic traffic volume.
• Determine the most effective landing pages that generate the most organic traffic.
• Record the positions of your main keywords to monitor keyword rankings and understand the visibility and authority score of your website via tools like Semrush. 

User behavior information

Combining these insights will help you develop a thorough strategy to enhance site performance and user experience.  

• Analyze session duration and the number of pages viewed per session to:
  • Determine which content engages or frustrates users.
  • Identify pages with high bounce rates to highlight areas where content or design may fall short of user expectations.
• Map the most popular navigation paths via your website to identify potential bottlenecks or chances for easier user journeys.  

Conversion metrics

Understanding the factors that influence conversions will show you much more than just how well your website is performing. It will draw attention to the requirements, preferences, and decision-making processes of your audience. 

• Highly converting pages offer information on user flows, design components, and successful messaging. Analyze where and how users perform crucial actions, including completing forms or making purchases, to get insight into what functions well and what may be improved. 
• Assessing the monetary effects of organic traffic serves to both validate future efforts and highlight the importance of SEO. A thorough performance report that incorporates these data offers a strategic basis for guiding your redesign. 

Make an Inventory of Your SEO Assets

Create a thorough inventory of your SEO resources to ensure nothing essential gets missed during the website redesign. This inventory will guide your redesign plan.

Keyword mapping

• List all the target keywords and monitor their current rankings to see their position in search results.
• Map each keyword to its unique URL by linking it to the relevant page.
• Identify high-performing keyword clusters by locating groups of related terms that produce considerable traffic. 

Content assets

• Use measures, including traffic, engagement, or conversion, to identify high-performing pages that will help you catalog your crucial content.
• Next, identify strategic landing pages that generate leads or sales.
• Document lead-generating content such as case studies, whitepapers, or ebooks, and include insightful blog entries that rank highly or get backlinks. 

Technical Assets

Pay attention to the following on the technical side:

• Keep a record of the technical aspects that are essential to SEO. 
• Clearly define your structure by mapping out your current URL hierarchy. 
• To avoid conflicts, keep track of all current redirects. 
•  Make sure you upload and update your XML sitemaps to search engines. 
• Check your robots.txt file to make sure no crucial pages have been unintentionally blocked.
• Add all this data in a spreadsheet and record metrics for each asset, such as traffic, backlinks, and conversions.

Create a Redirect Strategy and URL Structure Plan

Create a sensible and search engine-optimized URL structure when organizing a website overhaul. A carefully thought-out URL architecture facilitates search engine crawling and enhances user experience. 

Create a new URL structure

• Begin by crafting easily readable, descriptive URLs that contain relevant keywords.
• Manage your content to reflect your site’s structure, such as utilizing URLs like abc.com/category/subcategory/page.
• Steer clear of dynamic parameters and use clean URLs rather than query-string-based ones. 

Make a Comprehensive Redirect Map

• Next, use your asset inventory to map old URLs to their new locations.
• To transfer link equity and guarantee a seamless user experience, set up 301 permanent redirects.
• Test all redirects extensively using tools such as Redirect Checker or Screaming Frog to ensure they work correctly.

You can protect your SEO throughout the migration and prevent users from seeing 404 errors by properly organizing your URL structure and implementing a redirect strategy. 

Enhance your site architecture

The architecture of your website has a significant impact on how search engines index and comprehend your information. An optimized site architecture makes it easier for search engines and users to navigate your website. Since search engine bots can crawl a site more easily with an optimal layout, it improves your SEO performance. 

Organize your content

• Start by establishing a distinct hierarchy.
• Group related material into categories and subcategories.
• Essential pages should be available within three clicks of the homepage to limit click depth.
• Use breadcrumbs as well to display the user’s current location and enhance internal linking.

Enhance internal linking

• To help readers find relevant pages, strategically place internal links across related material to distribute link equity.
• Use descriptive anchor text that provides an accurate description of the linked content.
• Regularly look for and correct any internal link errors to prevent broken links.

Optimize navigation menus

• Simplify menus by maintaining clear and well-structured navigation.
• To highlight crucial pages, place them prominently in the navigation.
• The navigation should be user-friendly on all devices to optimize for mobile users.

Implement Technical SEO

Integrate key technical SEO components across your website to enhance site performance and search visibility. 

You may enhance your site’s crawlability, indexability, and user experience—all of which lead to higher search engine rankings—by considering these technical SEO components. 

Optimize meta tags

• Create distinctive, descriptive title tags that are under 60 characters long and contain the main keywords for every page.
• Craft compelling, 160-character meta descriptions that outline page content and entice readers to click through.

Optimize images and media

• Enhance accessibility and aid search engines in comprehending the content of images by adding descriptive alt attributes.
• Compressing images will also help you optimize their sizes and speed up load times without sacrificing quality. 

Optimize site speed

• Minimizing your CSS and JavaScript files will decrease their sizes and speed up loading times, which will increase the speed of your page.
• Allow browsers to cache frequently used files locally by turning on browser caching.
• Distribute your content across multiple servers using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to enhance global load times.

Content optimization

Strategic content migration is necessary for a successful website redesign to maintain SEO value and enhance content quality. 

Perform a content audit

• Start by listing every page that currently exists in the content inventory using programs like Screaming Frog.
• Analyze each page’s performance using data for traffic, engagement, and conversion.
• Look for missing or underrepresented topics or keywords to monitor content gaps. 

Create a migration strategy

• Prioritize moving high-performing pages first and focus on valuable content.
• Choose whether to update, merge, or remove underperforming pages by updating or deleting content that is out of date.
• Keep vital page URLs intact, if feasible, to ensure URL consistency and SEO value.

Post-launch optimization and monitoring

To preserve and enhance SEO performance, closely monitor the weeks after the launch of your website redesign.

• By routinely examining reports in Google Search Console, you can find crawl issues and quickly fix any crawling or indexing problems.
• Checking all 301 redirects’ functionality can protect link equity and stop issues from degrading user experience. 
• Closely monitor site load speed after launch to discover areas for improvement. 
• Regarding traffic, monitor organic visitors by contrasting post-launch traffic with your baseline metrics.
• Keep an eye on your target keywords’ ranks to spot any notable declines or increases. 

Wrapping up!

You can prevent traffic loss during migration and enhance your new site for improved search results by following our comprehensive SEO checklist for website redesigns. Keep in mind that prioritizing SEO during the redesign process turns risks into chances for improvement.

Implement a proactive approach to monitor your website’s performance and be ready to adjust to emerging SEO trends.

Planning an SEO-friendly website redesign? Contact Hashe!

Thinking about giving your website a fresh new look? Let’s make sure it doesn’t just look great, but also stays easy to find on Google. At Hashe, we know how to redesign a site without losing the SEO work you’ve already built. We will make it faster, easier to use on any device, and packed with the right keywords so your audience can find you effortlessly. In short, we will help you create a website that turns heads and brings in more visitors.

Professionals at Hashe specialize in blending stunning design with smart SEO strategies that keep your site visible, fast, and user-friendly. From optimizing site structure and mobile responsiveness to improving page speed and keyword targeting, we ensure your new look doesn’t come at the cost of your search visibility. Let’s transform your website into a powerful growth engine that attracts visitors and converts them into loyal customers!

Contact Hashe Computer Solutions for Free Website Audit Today!

Don’t worry if all this SEO stuff seems daunting; you don’t have to do it by yourself. At Hashe, our expertise lies in assisting companies in understanding and improving the SEO of their websites. Whether you want to boost your rankings, tackle any technical issues, or simply get a better grasp of your current audit report, we’re excited to assist you! What’s the best part? To get you started, we provide a free website audit. Let us work together to take your website to the next level!

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