Website Relaunch
A website relaunch is a major update or rebuild of a site that changes design, structure, content, or technology while trying to preserve or improve organic search performance.
What I’d do first
- Start with a full crawl and traffic benchmark.
- Build a complete 301 redirect map before touching code.
- Test everything in a staging environment that mirrors production.
- Keep a post-launch monitoring plan for the first month.
- Don't change URLs unless absolutely necessary.
I've seen relaunches go both ways — here's what I stick to.
The path I'd take
- Benchmark current performance. Pull last 3 months of Search Console data, analytics, and ranking positions. Note all core pages.
- Design the redirect strategy. For every URL that changes, write the destination URL. Keep old URLs if SEO signals are strong. Use Screaming Frog to verify redirects in staging.
- Build and test staging. Confirm all redirects work, forms submit, analytics fires, and robots.txt/sitemap are correct. Test Core Web Vitals on real devices.
- Launch with a monitoring plan. After go-live, submit the new XML sitemap to Search Console. Monitor crawl errors, drop in indexed pages, and sudden 404s daily for the first two weeks.
- Post-launch cleanup. Fix any redirect loops, soft 404s, or missing canonical tags. Re-crawl and check internal links. Give it 4 weeks before making major changes.
Watch-outs
- Changing URLs without a complete redirect map. Even one important URL left without a 301 can lose rankings.
- Launching without a staging test. I've seen forms broken, tracking missing, and pages blocked by noindex after go-live.
- Blocking pages with robots.txt or noindex after launch. Always check that your staging restrictions aren't carried over.
- Ignoring post-launch monitoring. 404s, redirect loops, and indexing drops often appear in the first days. If you don't catch them, traffic erodes fast.
What I got wrong
I once relaunched a site thinking a simple 301 redirect from the old homepage to the new homepage would preserve all equity. But I forgot about category pages, blog posts, and product URLs. Traffic dropped 40% in two weeks. Now I inventory every single URL — even the ones I assume are dead — and build a full redirect map before touching code.
Next step
Quick answers
How is a relaunch different from a migration?
A relaunch involves major changes on the same domain, while a migration moves to a new domain or platform. Both require careful SEO planning, but migrations need extra steps like domain verification and map updates.
Sources
Primary documentation is linked directly. Anything commercial is marked nofollow.
- Google Search Central — Most authoritative source for site moves, indexing, redirects, sitemaps, robots.txt, and migration guidance.
- Screaming Frog — Widely used crawl tool for relaunch audits, URL inventories, redirects, and technical checks.
- Ahrefs Blog — Well-known SEO reference with practical migration and relaunch checklists.
Notes from Callum Bennett.