The website relaunch without losses

What's at stake in a relaunch

The most important sentence first: Google doesn't know your company - Google knows addresses. Every single page of your website has built up a reputation over the years: it's been linked to and read. That reputation is attached to the exact address, say yourcompany.ch/services/heating.

A relaunch rebuilds the website, and in the process the addresses almost always change. /services/heating becomes /offering/thermal-systems, five subpages become one. To you, it's the same company with the same service. To Google, the old address is dead and the new one is a blank page.

And Google is only the best-known consumer of those addresses. The same addresses carry your regular customers' bookmarks, the links from partner firms and trade associations, the entry in the business directory, the QR code on last spring's advert and the PDF form a customer saved two years ago. Every one of those connections was made without asking you - and none of them updates itself when the new website arrives.

That's the entire mechanism behind the horror stories. It's not the new design that costs you visibility, and not the new technology - it's moving house without a mail forwarding order.

The good news: none of this is fate, and none of it is rocket science. It's craft with a handful of rules. The following chapters walk through them in order - from the inventory before the rebuild to the questions you may ask your web partner before you sign.

The inventory before the rebuild

Before anyone sketches a new design, one sheet of paper should record what the old website has earned. Not out of nostalgia, but for a simple reason: if that baseline isn't documented, nobody knows after the relaunch what "before" looked like - and then you can neither verify that the move worked nor prove it if something was lost.

Three lists are enough.

What you're found with today. Search Console - Google's free control centre for website owners - shows which search terms and which pages bring visitors to you today. That report can be exported; doing exactly that once before the relaunch, and filing it, is the job. If Search Console isn't set up for your website yet: that takes half an hour and should be the first step of the project, not the last.

Which addresses are worth something. The most-visited pages, the pages that bring enquiries - plus everything off-screen that points at your addresses: business cards, vehicle lettering, adverts, QR codes, quote templates. What's printed on paper can't be corrected after go-live; those addresses must survive the move, no matter what.

Where else you're listed. The Google Business Profile, local.ch and search.ch, trade and industry directories, partner websites that link to you. All of those entries point somewhere - after the relaunch they should point at the target, not into the void. Chapter 5 goes through them in detail.

The whole thing is one or two hours of work, and it's the best-invested time of the entire project. Whoever holds that sheet of paper can verify every later step instead of having to hope.

Redirects: the forwarding order

The solution for the address move is the permanent redirect: anyone who calls up the old address - a customer with a saved link just as much as Google - lands automatically on the correct new page. The reputation each page has earned moves along with it.

Four things decide whether this works.

Page by page, not wholesale. The most common shortcut mistake is redirecting everything to the new homepage. That tells Google: the heating page no longer exists. What's correct is a page-by-page mapping - the old heating page points to the new heating page. Building that list is manual work and the least glamorous part of the whole relaunch. It's also the most valuable.

Permanent means permanent. Google recommends keeping redirects in place for at least a year - and from your visitors' perspective, indefinitely, because the saved link in a regular customer's browser doesn't refresh itself after twelve months. Redirects are not a temporary arrangement for the transition. They belong to the new website like the legal notice does.

The cheapest redirect is the one you don't need. Where an address is good, it may survive the relaunch. If /services/heating is still called /services/heating on the new website, there's nothing to redirect and nothing to lose. Addresses are no place for creativity - on our own projects we deliberately keep proven addresses, even when everything around them is new.

Deleted is lost too. Relaunches love a clean-up: five service pages become one, the advice section gets cut. That can be the right call - but a page that no longer exists can no longer be found, however beautiful the new website is. The decision about which content goes should therefore be made deliberately, with the chapter 2 inventory on the table: whatever brings visitors today is not silently dropped.

And once the list is in place, one look inward: the links within the new website should point directly at the new addresses, not take the detour through the redirect. That's engine-room diligence - your web partner knows it, and you may ask about it.

When the domain changes too

Sometimes it's not just the website that changes but the company's address itself - after a rename, for instance. That's the most demanding version of the move, but it too is routine if you treat it as what it is: the same forwarding order, one size bigger.

On top of the page-by-page move, you report the change to Google directly: Search Console has a dedicated move function for this. It only works for moving one whole domain to another, and Google keeps processing the reported move for around 180 days - the rest of the transition runs on the redirects, which stay in place anyway.

A domain change affects more than the website, by the way: the email addresses move too, along with everything attached to them. The mail move therefore belongs in the same project plan - how email reliably reaches the inbox is its own topic and its own insight.

We recently guided a Swiss construction company through exactly this kind of complete change: new name, new brand, new domain - and every old address has redirected automatically to the new ones ever since, so nothing gets lost along the way.

Deep Dive

Case study CORUS: how one company changed its name, brand, website and domain in eight weeks

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The forgotten losses beyond Google

Rankings are the loss everyone talks about. The following four are missing from almost every relaunch plan - even though they're an hour's work.

The Google Business Profile. The entry that appears next to a search for your company name and on Google Maps carries your website address. You can update that field yourself at any time - after a domain change it belongs on the go-live checklist. And the reviews that have accumulated there? They're attached to the profile, not to the website. They survive every relaunch.

The Swiss directories. local.ch and search.ch draw from the same system, and businesses can maintain their entry themselves - the basic listing is free. Go through it once after the move, update the website address, done. The same applies to trade and industry directories you're listed in.

Other people's links. Partner firms, associations, old newspaper articles - links out there point at your old addresses. The redirects catch all of it, so nothing breaks here if chapter 3 is done properly. Still, it's worth briefly asking the two or three most important senders to update their link: a direct link is always the most stable connection. It's not an obligation.

Your own files. PDFs have addresses too: the price list, the registration form, the fact sheet that's been emailed around and saved in browsers for years. A relaunch that only thinks in pages leaves the files behind. They belong on the chapter 2 moving list - either they keep their address, or they get their own redirect.

Go-live day and the weeks after

When visitor numbers truly crash after a relaunch, two classics are worth checking before anyone suspects something complicated. The first is missing redirects - chapter 3. The second is more insidious: the forgotten construction sign.

During development, the new website is built on a staging environment, and to stop Google from showing that building site in its results early, it carries a "please do not index" sign - technically: noindex. If the website goes live with that sign still up, it disappears from Google. Not slowly, but reliably. It happens to experienced teams, it happens more often than the industry admits, and it's fixed in five minutes - if someone looks for it.

That's why go-live day needs a fixed inspection round, half an hour of craft: spot-check the redirects (do the most important old addresses reach their correct targets?), look for the noindex sign, submit the current sitemap (the website's table of contents for search engines) to Google. And the date itself needs a buffer: not on a Friday afternoon, not right before the company holidays. If something shows up, someone should be there to fix it - ideally in the first days, when almost nothing has been lost yet.

Even a clean move takes time afterwards. Google has to visit every old address, follow the redirect and re-evaluate the new page - for a small to medium website, experience says that takes a few weeks. During that time individual rankings may fluctuate. That's the moving box that hasn't been unpacked yet - no cause for concern.

What's not normal is a broad crash that hasn't turned around after two or three weeks. Then the order from above applies: check the redirects first, then look for the noindex sign. In the vast majority of cases it's one of the two - and both can be fixed after the fact. The earlier, the more of the old reputation can still be saved. Search Console is the first place to show whether the curves are behaving as they should - and the before-export from chapter 2 is now the yardstick.

Before you sign: what you may demand

You don't have to implement anything in this guide yourself. But you may demand it - and anyone commissioning a relaunch should, before signing the contract. Five questions belong on the table:

"Do I get a list of all old addresses and where each one leads?" That's the address list as a deliverable, not an internal detail. Whoever has no clear answer to this isn't planning the move.

"Do we document, before go-live, what we're found with today?" The Search Console baseline from chapter 2 - otherwise nobody knows afterwards what "before" was.

"How long will the redirects stay in place?" The right answer is in chapter 3: at least a year, better indefinitely. "A few months" is the wrong answer.

"Who does the inspection round on go-live day?" Redirects, noindex, sitemap - firmly scheduled, with a name attached, instead of left to chance.

"What's the plan if something jams after go-live?" A go-live with a buffer, and a person who is reachable in the first days and fixes what shows up.

None of these questions is specialist knowledge, and no serious web firm will mind them. It's the diligence that makes the difference between "the new website is online" and "the new website is online and customers can find it".

Because that's the yardstick in the end: the measures in this guide are unspectacular. A list, a forwarding order, an inspection round, a few weeks of patience with open eyes. None of it shows on the finished website. But they decide whether the new website builds from day one on what the old one earned - or starts from zero.

Questions from practice

What business owners ask us before a relaunch - answered the way we answer them.

Do we lose our Google reviews when the website is rebuilt?

No. Reviews are attached to your Google Business Profile, not to your website. A relaunch doesn't touch the profile, and after a domain change you simply enter the new website address there.

How long does it take until Google has fully taken over the new website?

For small and medium websites, Google says most pages move within a few weeks. During that time individual rankings may fluctuate - that's the normal course of a move, not an alarm signal.

Our last relaunch shipped without redirects. Can that still be fixed?

Yes. Redirects work retroactively - the sooner they're in place, the more of the old reputation can be saved. You'll find the old addresses in Search Console, in your own documents, or through the links others have set to you.

Do the redirects have to be removed at some point?

No. Google recommends keeping them for at least a year; from your visitors' perspective you keep them indefinitely, because the saved link in a regular customer's browser never updates itself. Redirects break nothing and cost practically nothing.

Our agency says a dip after a relaunch is normal. Is that true?

Half true. Fluctuations over a few weeks are normal. A broad crash that doesn't turn around is not - it almost always has one of two causes: missing redirects or a forgotten noindex sign. Both can be checked and fixed.

Does anything change about our email with the new website?

Not with a pure relaunch - your mailboxes run independently of the website. If the domain changes, though, your email addresses move too, and then the mail move belongs in the same plan. How email reliably reaches the inbox is covered in our insight "When your quote lands in spam".