- Rankings hang on URLs: every old address needs a destination - a 301 redirect or a conscious farewell.
- The relaunch is the best moment for technical SEO: load time, structured data, clean structure.
- After launch, monitoring decides: miss the first two weeks and you notice losses in the quarterly report.
Why relaunches cost rankings
The sad truth: most ranking losses after a relaunch are self-inflicted. Google has nothing against new designs - but a lot against vanished URLs, lost content and slower pages. A relaunch is open-heart surgery: plannable, but not without preparation.
Before the relaunch: inventory
Before anything new is built, you need a complete picture of what exists:
- URL inventory: all indexed pages from Search Console, sitemap and crawl - including the forgotten ones.
- Ranking inventory: which pages bring visitors, for which queries? These pages are your capital.
- Backlink inventory: externally linked URLs must never end in a void.
Practical tip: export the top pages by clicks from Search Console for the last 12 months. Everything on that list gets either the same URL in the new setup or a 301 redirect - no exceptions.
The redirect mapping
The heart of every relaunch is a table with two columns: old URL, new URL. Sounds banal, decides your organic survival. The rules:
- 301 (permanent), not 302 (temporary).
- The target is the closest matching page - not the homepage across the board. Mass redirects to the homepage are treated like 404s.
- No redirect chains: old points directly to new, not via stopovers.
- Where possible: keep the URLs. The cheapest redirect is the one you don't need.
"The best relaunch is one Google never notices - except through better signals."
DUNA engineering principle
During the build: use the technical window
If new, then properly. The relaunch is the moment for the technical SEO that never gets priority in daily business: Core Web Vitals as an acceptance criterion, structured data (organisation, articles, FAQ), clean heading hierarchies, speaking URLs, hreflang for multilingual sites and a sitemap that keeps itself current.
And: the new site stays under wraps until go-live. A publicly reachable staging environment without noindex is a classic with duplicate-content consequences.
Launch day
- Test redirects BEFORE go-live - automated, against the full mapping table.
- Remove noindex, check robots.txt - the second classic: the block goes live too.
- Submit the new sitemap in Search Console.
- Point internal links at new URLs instead of relying on redirects.
After launch: two weeks on watch
Now it shows whether the operation succeeded. Watch daily: 404 errors in Search Console (each one is a hole in the mapping), crawl stats, indexing status and the rankings of your top pages. Minor fluctuation over two or three weeks is normal - a steady downward trend is not.
