Redesign without losing your Google traffic

Most clinic websites that get rebuilt lose some of their search traffic, and most owners only notice months later, when fewer new patients call. It is rarely the design's fault. It is usually the URLs.

Why addresses matter more than the design

Google ranks pages, not websites. Every page has an address, and its ranking history belongs to that address. Change it, and you are asking Google to work out that the new page is the same as the old one. Redirects help, but each one is a small risk, and a rebuild can create hundreds of them at once.

Crawl the old site before you draw anything

On the Kinnection rebuild, the first job was a full crawl of the live site: every indexed page, every canonical tag, every broken booking link. That list became the contract. The new site was not finished until every address on it resolved.

Resist tidying

My own first build grouped the pages into neat folders. It looked better and was worse, because every one of those tidy paths was a new address. They went back to the old flat structure. Nobody books an appointment because a URL is pretty.

Move everything, not the best bits

The old blog had 76 posts. It is tempting to keep the ten good ones, but from the outside you cannot tell which post quietly brings in patients from a search nobody thought of. All 76 moved, with their images, so nothing depends on the old WordPress install.

A short checklist

Before a rebuild goes live, check that every old URL returns the same page or a single redirect, that canonical tags point at the new site, that images are hosted on the new site, and that the sitemap lists the real pages. Then crawl the staging site once more before the domain switches.