Relaunching your website without vanishing from Google

Why rankings get lost in the first place

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.

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 forwarding order: redirects

The solution 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.

Three 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 for your visitors' sake, ideally without an end date, because the saved link in a regular customer's browser doesn't update itself after twelve months. Redirects aren't scaffolding for a transition period. They belong to the new website like the legal notice does.

The cheapest redirect is the one you don't need. Where an address works, let it survive the relaunch. If /services/heating is still called /services/heating on the new site, 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.

The two mistakes behind almost every crash

When visitor numbers genuinely collapse after a relaunch, two classics deserve a look before anyone suspects something complicated.

The first is simply missing redirects - see above. The second is sneakier: the forgotten construction sign. During development, the new website is built in a test environment, and to stop Google from showing that building site in search results early, it carries a "please don't index this" sign - technically: noindex. If the website goes live with that sign still attached, it disappears from Google. Not slowly - reliably. This happens to experienced teams, it happens more often than the industry admits, and it takes five minutes to fix - if someone checks.

Then there are the smaller siblings: a table of contents for search engines (the sitemap) still listing the old addresses. Internal links pointing at old addresses and taking the detour through the redirect. And content that was quietly dropped during the relaunch - a page that no longer exists can no longer rank, however good the new website looks.

When the domain changes too

Sometimes it's not just the website that changes but the company's address itself - after a renaming, 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 up.

On top of the page-by-page move, you report the change to Google directly: Search Console - Google's free control centre for website owners - has a dedicated move feature that speeds up the transition and keeps working for around half a year afterwards.

We recently handled a complete switch like this for a Swiss construction company: new name, new brand, new domain - and every old address has redirected to its new counterpart ever since, so nothing gets lost along the way.

Deep Dive

How one company changed its name, brand, website and domain in eight weeks

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What's normal afterwards - and what isn't

Even a clean move takes time. Google has to visit every old address, follow the redirect and re-evaluate the new page - for a small to medium website, in our experience that takes a few weeks. During that time, individual rankings may wobble. That's a 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 work through the checks above, in that order: the redirects first (does every important old address lead to its proper destination?), then the hunt 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 sooner, the more of the old reputation is still there to save.

What you're entitled to ask of your web partner

You don't have to implement any of this yourself. But you're entitled to ask for it - and anyone commissioning a relaunch should, before signing the order. Four points should be on the table:

The address list as a deliverable. Ask directly: "Will I get a list of every old address and where each one leads?" Anyone who doesn't have a clear answer to that isn't planning the move.

A look at the numbers, before and after. Search Console shows which search terms and pages bring people to your website today - that baseline should be documented before the relaunch, otherwise nobody knows afterwards what "before" looked like. And after go-live, it's the first place to show when something's stuck.

The inspection round on go-live day. Spot-check the redirects, hunt for the noindex sign, submit the sitemap - half an hour of hands-on work, firmly scheduled rather than left to chance.

A go-live with a buffer. Not on Friday afternoon, not right before the company holidays. If something shows up, someone should be there to fix it - ideally in the first days, while almost nothing has been lost yet.

None of these points is specialist knowledge. It's the care that separates "the new website is online" from "the new website is online and customers can find it".

What counts in the end

The real risk to your visibility is a relaunch without a moving plan. The measures are unspectacular: a complete list of old and new addresses, redirects that stay, a quick check of sitemap and noindex on go-live day, and a few weeks of patience with open eyes afterwards.

None of it is visible on the finished website. But it decides whether the new site builds on everything the old one earned from day one - or starts from zero.