How to rebuild your website and keep the searches that bring RFQs

A new website goes live on a Monday. It looks better than the old one in every way. Three weeks later the sales manager asks why the RFQ inbox has gone quiet, and nobody can answer, because the GA4 tracking did not make it across either.

This is the most expensive kind of website project: the one that quietly removes the searches that used to bring work. The old pages had years of ranking history. The new ones start from zero unless someone tells Google where each old page went.

It does not have to go that way. On the rebuild for Self Inspection, an AI vehicle inspection company in San Diego, SEO was planned in from day one, and organic traffic more than tripled in seven months. Here is my checklist, in four stages.

Five ways a redesign loses its searches

When a site loses search traffic after a redesign, the cause is usually one of five things. None of them is about design.

• URLs change without redirects. /products/hydraulic-press-200t becomes /machines/presses, the old address returns a 404, and that page's ranking history is thrown away.
• Ranking content is cut. The long page with tolerances, materials and a datasheet is replaced by three lines and a photo, because the new design “needs less text”.
• The staging site's noindex goes live. The setting that hid the test site from Google is copied to the live site and tells Google to drop every page.
• Tracking breaks. The GA4 tag, the Tag Manager container or the form's thank-you event is missing, so you cannot even see the damage.
• The new site is slower. Bigger images, a heavier theme and chat widgets slow down exactly the pages that rank.

Each of these is cheap to prevent and expensive to repair. Google's own guidance on site moves tells you to expect temporary fluctuation in rankings during the move. You want that to be the only dip.

Before: record what the old site earns

Start before the designer opens Figma. The old site is your baseline, and once it is switched off you can never measure it again.

1. Crawl and export every URL. Use a crawler such as Screaming Frog, plus your XML sitemap. Include PDFs and datasheets: on industrial sites a datasheet PDF often brings search traffic of its own.
2. Export Search Console data. In the Performance report, export top pages and top queries for the longest date range available. These are the pages you cannot afford to lose. Flag them for extra care at every step.
3. Record baseline leads. Write down RFQs, form submissions, calls and GA4 key events per month for the last six to twelve months. If you cannot, fix tracking first: playbook 1 shows how to count every RFQ back to the search that started it.
4. Map every old URL to a new one. One row per old URL in a spreadsheet: old address, new address, the primary search it ranks for, and status. No row stays empty.

Google recommends server-side permanent redirects from each old URL to its new one, and warns against sending many old URLs to one irrelevant page such as the new home page. Redirect a discontinued product to its closest replacement or its category.

During the build: keep what ranks

Block the staging site from Google with a password, not just a noindex tag. A password cannot be copied to the live site by accident. A noindex setting can.

Keep the content that ranks. If a page ranks for “CNC milling aluminium parts”, the new version keeps the text, specifications and FAQs that earned that position. Keep titles and main headings on ranking pages too, unless you have a clear reason to change them.

Give every page one primary search before anyone writes copy. That is how I planned the launch for a US beverage destruction company: every page was mapped to one primary search before writing. In the first month the new site had 9 keywords in Google's top 10. Playbook 2 shows how to find the searches that come before a quote request, and my article on capability pages covers what those pages need to contain.

No backlinks were built. In about six weeks the site collected 4,260 search impressions and 78 clicks, with desktop Lighthouse performance at 98 and the largest content loading in 0.9 seconds.

Launch day: the checklist

Launch on a quiet weekday morning, not on a Friday afternoon, with the developer and the owner of the redirect map on the same call for the first two hours.

Speed is part of the migration

A redesign is the cheapest moment to fix speed, because the templates are being rebuilt anyway. Google's Core Web Vitals give you three numbers to hold the developer to, measured at the 75th percentile of page loads.

On an interior design software company's WordPress site, I cut about 4 seconds from every load (-65%): largest contentful paint 1.1 seconds, zero layout shift, 0ms blocking time. Google Analytics and Tag Manager stayed intact throughout, the part clients forget to ask about. A fast site that stops counting leads is not an improvement.

Run Lighthouse on staging before launch for each page type (home, category, product, capability page, contact), on mobile as well as desktop.

After launch: check it daily for two weeks

The first two weeks decide whether a dip stays a dip. Every morning, check three things.

• Search Console indexing. In the Pages report, look for new 404 errors and pages excluded by a noindex tag. Every 404 on a URL that used to rank gets a redirect today, not next sprint.
• Your top 20 old URLs. Open them by hand. Each one should land on the right new page in a single redirect.
• Leads against the baseline. Compare RFQs, forms and calls per week with the numbers you recorded before launch. Traffic can wobble. Leads are what you are protecting.

Google says a small to medium site can take a few weeks for most pages to move, so judge the result after a month, not two days. Keep the redirects for at least a year, as Google recommends, and in practice for good: supplier directories, old emails and PDFs will keep sending people to the old addresses.

What to do this week

If a new website is on the plan for this year, do three things before anyone approves a design.

1. Export your Search Console top pages and queries today and save the file with the project documents.
2. Write down monthly leads for the last six months, from GA4 and the sales inbox, as your baseline.
3. Ask whoever builds the site for a redirect map, one row per old URL, due before launch.

The case studies show how other launches went. If you want a second pair of eyes on your migration plan before launch, that is the review I do on a call.