SEO · WEBSITE REBUILDS
A new website should grow your traffic, not torch it. Here is the practical checklist we run through on every rebuild so Google keeps sending you the visitors you have already earned.
Black Sheep Creative · 7 min read
Why this matters
Your old website has been quietly building trust with Google for years. Every page that ranks, every backlink pointing at it, every customer who has bookmarked a URL. That is real equity.
A rebuild puts all of that at risk. New URLs. New page structures. New code. New hosting. If any of it is handled poorly, Google sees a different website and you start again from scratch.
The good news: avoiding that is a checklist, not a mystery. Here are the ten things we work through on every rebuild so the new site picks up exactly where the old one left off.
A rebuild is not a fresh start for your SEO. It is a hand-off. Get the hand-off wrong and Google forgets you.
The 10 things to lock in
Work through these in order. Each one builds on the last, and skipping any of them is where most websites lose their rankings post-launch.
Crawl and save the old website first
Before a single thing changes, run a full crawl of the live site. Every URL, every page title, every meta description, every heading, every image alt tag. This is your reference document for the rebuild and your safety net if anything goes missing.
Identify your top-performing pages
Pull the last 12 months of Google Analytics and Google Search Console data. Find the pages bringing in real traffic, real leads, and real rankings. These are the pages the rebuild absolutely must not break, and they are the pages that deserve the most care in the new structure.
Map old URLs to new URLs (301 redirects)
Every old URL that is changing needs a 301 redirect pointing to its new home. Not a 302. Not a generic redirect to the homepage. A direct, page-by-page mapping. This is the single most important step for protecting your rankings and the one most often skipped.
Carry across page titles and meta descriptions
The titles and descriptions on your high-ranking pages are working. Do not let a designer or developer rewrite them on a whim. Bring them across as-is, then improve them deliberately page by page once the new site is stable.
Keep your heading structure clean
One H1 per page. H2s for major sections. H3s for sub-sections. Google reads this structure to understand what a page is about. New design templates often break this without anyone noticing, especially when headings get styled visually but not coded correctly.
Submit a new XML sitemap
A sitemap is the menu you hand to Google. The moment the new site goes live, generate a fresh XML sitemap with every new URL, then submit it through Google Search Console. This tells Google where everything lives now and speeds up re-indexing.
Double-check the robots.txt file
During development, most websites have a robots.txt rule telling Google not to crawl them. If that rule is still in place when you launch, your shiny new site is invisible. Check it on day one of go-live. Then check it again.
Check image alt tags and file sizes
Every image needs descriptive alt text for accessibility and for image search rankings. Every image should also be properly compressed. Page speed is a ranking factor, and bloated images are the most common cause of a slow new website.
Re-install analytics and Search Console
Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Google Search Console, Meta Pixel, anything else. These often get missed in a rebuild and you lose weeks of data before anyone notices. Verify they are live and firing on the new site before launch day, not after.
Test internal links and fix the broken ones
Internal links pass authority between pages and help Google understand how your site fits together. After launch, run another crawl and fix every broken link, every link still pointing at an old URL, and every link that 404s. This is the polish that separates a good rebuild from a great one.
After launch
Even with the checklist done well, expect a small dip in traffic for two to four weeks while Google re-crawls and re-ranks your pages. That is normal.
What is not normal is a dip that does not recover. So in those first 30 days, watch Google Search Console daily for crawl errors, watch your top pages for ranking changes, and watch organic traffic against the same period last year. If something is wrong, you want to catch it in week one, not month three.
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Watch Search Console weekly
Crawl errors, indexing issues, and coverage warnings will show up here first. Check the Pages and Performance reports every week for the first month.
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Compare year-on-year, not week-on-week
Traffic naturally fluctuates. The honest comparison is the same month last year, not the week before launch. That tells you whether you are actually losing ground.
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Update your highest-value backlinks
Your redirects will catch most of it. But for your most important backlinks (partners, suppliers, directories) ask them to update the link to the new URL directly. Cleaner, faster, safer.
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Re-crawl after 30 days
Run a full crawl of the new site a month after launch. Catch any 404s, redirect chains, or missing meta data that slipped through the first review.
How we handle it
On every rebuild we deliver, the SEO checklist is not an afterthought. It runs from discovery through to the 30-day post-launch review.
Before we touch a design, we crawl the existing site, pull a year of Search Console data, and identify the pages doing the heavy lifting. During build, the redirect map gets drafted in parallel with the sitemap. At launch, we run a pre-flight check that covers every item on this list. Then we monitor Search Console and rankings for the first month so anything unexpected gets caught early.
See our website process
From discovery to launch and beyond, here is how we keep your rankings intact while we rebuild your website.
Let's have a short chat about your current website, where it is performing, and how to protect that performance through a rebuild. No pressure, no pitch.