Short answer: To redesign a company website without losing Google rankings, list every URL that earns traffic or links, point each one at its closest new page with a permanent 301 or 308 redirect, and carry over titles, meta descriptions, structured data and hreflang. Then submit a new sitemap in Search Console and watch both sets of URLs for several weeks; Google says some ranking movement during a move is normal.
Key takeaways
- Redirect page by page: Google recommends server-side permanent redirects from each old URL to its new counterpart.
- Skip the home-page dump: Sending many old URLs to one unrelated page, such as the home page, may be treated as a soft 404.
- Keep redirects for a year or more: Google's guide says at least one year.
- Change of Address is for domains: The Search Console tool applies when the domain or subdomain changes; new paths on the same domain do not need it.
Step one: an inventory of every URL that matters
A redirect map can only cover URLs someone listed. Collect them from four sources: the current XML sitemap, a full crawl of the live site, the Search Console performance report sorted by clicks over the last 12 months, and the pages other sites link to. Add PDFs and campaign landing pages that never made it into the menu. On bilingual Israeli sites, note that Google's URL guidance asks for percent-encoded non-ASCII characters, so a Hebrew path can appear in two forms, and both must resolve.
For each URL, record the title, meta description, canonical, structured data types and monthly clicks; that sheet is the acceptance test for the new site. Fields kept as editable data, as in structuring content in a headless CMS, move with far less manual work.
Building the 301 redirect map
| Old URL situation | What to do |
|---|---|
| Page kept, path changed | 301 to the new path |
| Two pages merged | 301 both to the merged page |
| Page removed, close substitute exists | 301 to the substitute |
| Page removed, nothing relevant left | Return 404 or 410 |
| Domain or subdomain change | Redirects plus the Change of Address tool |
Send every old URL straight to its final address. Google advises short redirect chains, ideally no more than three hops. If the redesign also swaps the platform, as in choosing between Webflow, WordPress and Next.js, confirm early that the new stack can serve thousands of server-side redirects.
