15 Things to Fix Before You Relaunch Your Website

A redesign is one of the few moments where a small business can genuinely hurt its own search rankings and lead flow overnight — not because the new site looks worse, but because a handful of unglamorous technical steps get skipped in the rush to launch. This checklist covers the ones that actually matter.

Before you touch the new design

1. Export your current URL list. Crawl your live site (Screaming Frog, or even your sitemap.xml) and save every indexed URL before it changes.
2. Note your top-performing pages. Check Search Console for which pages currently drive impressions and clicks — these are the ones you can't afford to break.
3. Save your current meta titles and descriptions. You'll want a reference so nothing regresses silently.
4. Document existing structured data. If you have FAQ, Product, or LocalBusiness schema live, note it so it gets carried into the new build.

During the rebuild

5. Map old URLs to new ones. Every URL that's changing needs a 301 redirect planned — not a vague "we'll fix it later."
6. Keep URL structure stable where you can. Changing URLs unnecessarily is the single most common cause of ranking loss after a redesign.
7. Carry over alt text on images, not just the images themselves — a common casualty of a straight visual refresh.
8. Test mobile page speed, not just desktop. Most small business traffic is mobile, and a heavier new design can quietly tank Core Web Vitals.
9. Re-verify forms actually submit — contact forms, quote requests, newsletter signups. A broken form on a new site is invisible until a lead reports it.

Before you flip the switch

10. Set up 301 redirects for every changed URL from your saved list, not just the obvious ones.
11. Update your XML sitemap and resubmit it in Search Console the day you launch.
12. Re-verify analytics and conversion tracking — a redesign that "loses" a month of data because tracking wasn't reconnected is a common, avoidable mistake.
13. Check indexability — confirm the new pages aren't accidentally set to noindex from staging.
14. Re-submit your sitemap and request re-indexing for your top pages in Search Console.
15. Monitor Search Console weekly for the first month — redirect errors and crawl issues show up there before they show up in traffic reports.

If this list feels like a lot to track manually, that's exactly why we built a free pre-launch checklist download — a shorter, printable version of this same process. And if you'd rather have the redesign itself handled end-to-end, including the redirect mapping and Search Console cleanup, that's part of every business website design project we deliver.