Website Relaunch Without Ranking Loss

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. The most common pitfalls and how to avoid them are collected in avoiding relaunch mistakes.

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.

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 Outdated content is updated, duplicates are merged and missing pieces are added.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. What matters with formats, sizes and alternative text is explained in our article on optimising website images.

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.

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.