Website Relaunch Without Ranking Loss

Not every older website needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. Sometimes a refresh is enough, sometimes a full relaunch is the better path. The decision depends on what exactly is going wrong. We therefore examine your existing site soberly and tell you openly whether the effort is worthwhile. Typical triggers for a relaunch include a site that no longer works properly on mobile devices, a design that no longer suits the company, an outdated content management system without security updates or simply the wish to be found again and to receive more enquiries.

The most common and most expensive mistake in a relaunch is the loss of search rankings. Over the years, your website has built trust with search engines: certain pages are reachable under certain addresses and are displayed for matching search terms. If the relaunch changes the address structure without old addresses redirecting cleanly to new ones, these rankings collapse. In the worst case, your freshly designed site is suddenly barely findable, even though it is technically better than before.

This is precisely where we focus. Before a single line of the new design is created, we capture all existing addresses of your website and check which of them bring visitors and visibility. For each of these addresses, we define where it should redirect to after the relaunch. These so-called 301 redirects ensure that both visitors and search engines land in the right place without detours. This way we carry the visibility built over years into the new appearance instead of giving it away. In addition, we coordinate the approach with our search engine optimization, so the relaunch not only preserves but improves.

A relaunch is a project with many moving parts. So that nothing falls through the cracks, we work according to a clear, multi-stage process. Each step builds on the previous one, and you always know where the project stands. We deliberately keep the effort on your side low and coordinate all important decisions personally with you, instead of sending you through a call center.

Over the years, a lot of valuable content has accumulated on your website: service descriptions, references, advice articles or answers to common questions. Carelessly losing this content during a relaunch would be wasteful, because it often contributes significantly to findability. We secure your existing text and images, map them to the new structure and revise them where it makes sense. Outdated content is updated, duplicates are merged and missing pieces are added. This turns the content grown over time into a tidy, clear information architecture.

During migration, we pay particular attention to images. Old websites frequently contain huge, uncompressed photos that slow down loading. We optimize the imagery in modern formats so it looks sharp but requires only a fraction of the original data volume. The text also receives a revision in terms of readability, clear address and the terms your customers actually search for.

A relaunch is only worthwhile if it makes a noticeable difference. The following comparison shows the areas in which a modern, freshly built website typically differs from an aged legacy site. Which points are particularly important for your project, we clarify in a personal conversation.

From numerous projects, we know the pitfalls where relaunches fail. We have a proven approach for each of these points that keeps the risks small. A relaunch is always an intervention in a live system, which is precisely why we plan it so carefully.

While we work on your new website, your old site remains fully online. Development takes place on a separate preview environment that is blocked for search engines, so no duplicate content arises. Only when everything is tested and approved do we switch over. This switchover usually takes only a short time and can be scheduled for a low-traffic period. For your customers, the transition is therefore almost unnoticeable. Immediately after go-live we check whether all redirects take effect and the most important pages are reachable correctly.

In the weeks after switching over, we keep an eye on how the rankings develop. Search engines need some time to fully capture the new structure. Minor fluctuations are normal in this phase. Should an address not redirect correctly or an important page lose visibility, we recognize it early and adjust. On request, we then accompany your site permanently with our website care from 49 € per month, so it stays secure, fast and current in the long run.

A relaunch is the ideal moment to think beyond mere appearance. If you are repositioning anyway, it is worth setting the course for more visibility and new sales channels right away. Many companies therefore combine the relaunch with further building blocks that mesh seamlessly because everything comes from a single source.