Website redesign in Wales: keeping the rankings when the URLs change, the redirect map, the Welsh twins, and the three weeks after launch
A redesign loses rankings when old addresses die without a redirect. The map of old to new, the Welsh twins, and the three weeks after launch.
By Daniel Stoychev, Webso Digital · 6 October 2026 · 8 min read
A redesign loses its rankings for one reason far more often than any other: the old addresses stop existing and nothing tells Google where the pages went. The fix is a map, written before the new site is built, of every old address to the new address that replaces it, served as a permanent redirect on launch day, with the Welsh pages mapped to their Welsh twins and not to the English home page. The second cause is a new site that says less than the old one: shorter service pages, a merged page where there were three, a gallery where there was text. The third is a launch with the search engine told to stay away, a line left over from the staging site. Everything else about a redesign is design; these three are the rankings.
Before anything is designed
- Export every address Google knows. Search Console's Pages report, the old sitemap and a crawl of the live site together give the list; the Performance report, filtered by page over sixteen months, shows which addresses earn anything.
- Mark the earning pages. A page with clicks or a top-ten position is kept, with its words and its address if possible, or mapped one to one if the address has to change. It is not merged, shortened or renamed for tidiness.
- Write the map: old address to new address, one line each, including the Welsh addresses, the images people land on from image search, and the PDFs. An old address with no new equivalent maps to the closest page, not to the home page.
- Decide what is deliberately dropped, and let those addresses return a real not-found status, so that Google removes them rather than keeping a ghost.
The redirect, and the thing that is not one
A redirect is a response from the server that says, before any page is sent, that the address has moved permanently, with the new address. The browser and the crawler follow it and the new address inherits the old one's standing. The thing that is not one is a page that loads, shows a message or an empty template, and then sends the visitor on by script or by a meta refresh. That page returns a success status, and Google reads a success status as a page, indexes the stub, and files the old address and the new one as two different things. We have watched that mistake take a large part of a product catalogue out of Google in a month. The test is simple: fetch an old address and read the status line. It must say moved permanently, and it must say it once, not through a chain.
| Launch day check | How | Pass |
|---|---|---|
| Every old address answers | Fetch the list from the map | Each one returns a permanent redirect to the mapped page, in one hop |
| The new pages are indexable | View the source of five new pages | No noindex line, no staging robots file, the canonical pointing at the page itself |
| The Welsh twins pair | View the head of a Welsh page and its English twin | hreflang both ways, canonical to self, and the Welsh redirecting to Welsh |
| The sitemap is new | Fetch it | Only new addresses, each with a real last-modified date; submitted in Search Console the same day |
| The tracking fires | Submit the form and ring the number yourself | The enquiry arrives and the analytics records it |
The Welsh twins in a redesign
A bilingual site has two sets of addresses to map and one more way to go wrong: the Welsh pages redirected to the English home page because the map was written for the English site and the Welsh was an afterthought. Every Welsh address maps to its Welsh twin, the hreflang pairs are rebuilt on the new structure, and the Welsh sitemap entries carry the alternates. If the redesign changes how the Welsh is organised, from a cookie switch to its own folder, say, that is the moment the Welsh pages first get their own addresses and the moment Google first sees them as pages; expect the Welsh impressions to appear from nothing in the weeks after launch, which is a gain rather than a loss, and read it as one.
Do not launch on a Friday, and do not launch in the week before the business's busiest season. A redirect map has a mistake in it somewhere, and the day to find it is a Tuesday in a quiet month.
When the address should not change at all
The safest redirect is the one that is never needed. If the old site's addresses are sensible, the service pages at their own names, the Welsh under its own folder, the new site keeps them, and the map is short. The redesign is then a change of design and words at the same addresses, which Google reads as pages improving rather than pages moving, and the rankings carry without a day's interruption. An address changes only when the old one was wrong: a number where a name should be, a page that served two subjects, a Welsh page that never had an address of its own. Most of the Welsh business sites we redesign keep two thirds of their addresses, and the map covers the third that had to change.
The three weeks after launch
- Day one: the checks in the table, then the sitemap submitted in both Search Console properties, and the ten most important old addresses inspected with the URL tool to confirm the redirect is seen.
- Week one: the Pages report read daily for a rise in not-found or redirect errors; each one is a line missing from the map, fixed the same day.
- Weeks two and three: the Performance report compared, page by page, with the same weeks before launch. Impressions on the mapped pages should hold or rise within days; a page whose impressions fell to nothing has a redirect that is not seen, or a page that lost its words.
- What not to do: nothing structural for a month after launch. A title rewritten, an address changed again or a page merged in week two cannot be told apart from the redesign in the data.
The redesign page describes how we run a rebuild for a Welsh business, including the map and the launch day; the no-enquiries guide beside this one is for the site that kept its rankings and still has a quiet phone.
Questions on this topic
Will a website redesign hurt my rankings?
Only if the old addresses die without a permanent redirect, the new pages say less than the old, or the site launches with the search engine told to stay away. All three are avoidable.
Is a redirect page the same as a redirect?
No. A page that loads and then sends the visitor on returns a success status and is indexed as a page. A redirect is a server response that says the address has moved, before any page is sent.
Where should an old page with no new equivalent redirect?
To the closest relevant page, not to the home page. If nothing is relevant, let it return a real not-found status so Google removes it.
How do Welsh pages work in a redesign?
Each Welsh address maps to its Welsh twin, the hreflang pairs are rebuilt, and the Welsh sitemap entries carry the alternates. Never redirect Welsh pages to the English home page.
How long until the rankings settle after a redesign?
Impressions on mapped pages hold or rise within days. Give the site a month before any further structural change, so the two can be told apart.