Your business has outgrown its website, but the old site still brings in enquiries from Google. A redesign can keep that. This guide is for established businesses replacing a bigger site, and every step comes from Google’s own guidance, read on 6 November 2026.

The short version: Google says to map your old site’s URLs (page addresses) to the URLs for the new site. Where an address changes, set up a permanent redirect, such as a 301, which sends visitors and Google on to the new page. Google says permanent redirects “don’t cause a loss in PageRank”, and to keep them “generally at least 1 year”. Update your internal links and sitemap, remove any block that kept the test site out of Google, then check Search Console after launch. Google says rankings can move for a while as it rereads the site, and “a site’s rankings will settle down over time.”

What to do next: Replacing a site of up to 15 pages? Our Specialist build starts at $1,500 including GST. See what’s included on our pricing page, or start a Specialist project.

1. List every page on the old site

Start with a full list of the old site’s page addresses. Google’s guide to moving a site says, “It’s important to map your old site’s URLs to the URLs for the new site.” Then, for each old address, “decide where each one should redirect to.”

2. Organise the new site in a logical way

A page address that stays the same needs no redirect. Google’s SEO Starter Guide says, “When you’re setting up or redoing your site, it can be good to organize it in a logical way.” It also says to “include words in the URL that may be useful for users.”

Google has a separate guide “only for migrations that don’t affect the user-visible URL”, such as switching hosting providers. Its steps are to prepare and test the new hosting, point the domain’s DNS (the setting that tells browsers where your site lives) to it, watch the traffic, then shut down the old hosting. Google says a “temporary drop in Googlebot’s crawl rate immediately after the launch” is normal. Googlebot is the software Google uses to read websites.

3. Redirect every address that changes

A redirect sends anyone who visits an old address on to the new one. Google says, “We recommend server side permanent redirects from the old URLs to the new URLs,” and to use “HTTP permanent redirects if possible, such as 301 and 308.” A server-side redirect is set up on the hosting, not inside the page.

Google’s rules for redirects:

Make them permanent. A permanent redirect (301 or 308) tells Google the new address should be the main one, and Google will “Show the new redirect target in search results.” A temporary one (302, 303 or 307) doesn’t send that signal. Google says to “Use permanent redirects when you’re sure that the redirect won’t be reverted.” Its redirects guide has the detail.
Keep them. “Keep the redirects for as long as possible, generally at least 1 year.”
Go straight to the final page. “Avoid chaining redirects.” A chain is one redirect pointing to another.
Don’t send everything to the home page. “Don’t redirect many old URLs to one irrelevant single URL destination, such as the home page of the new site.” Google says this “can confuse users and might be treated as a soft 404 error”. A soft 404 is when Google treats a page as missing even though it loads.
Let dead pages go. If an old page has no replacement, Google says to make sure it returns “an HTTP 404 or 410 error response code on the new site”. That is the “page not found” signal.
Avoid JavaScript redirects. Google says to use them only if you can’t do server-side or meta refresh redirects, because Google “might never see it if rendering of the content failed”.

If we’re redesigning your site, we set up these redirects from your old page addresses to the new ones. See how CatalystHub handles a rebuild.

4. Move the content, not just the design

Keep the same words on phones. Google says it “uses the mobile version of a site’s content, crawled with the smartphone agent, for indexing and ranking.” It asks you to “Make sure that your mobile site contains the same content as your desktop site”, with the same headings and the same structured data. So a new design that hides text on phones can take that text out of Google.
Point your own links at the new addresses. Google says to “Change the internal links on the new site from the old URLs to the new URLs”. It also says the canonical tags should use the new addresses. A canonical tag is the tag naming a page’s main address.
Link to every page that matters. Google says, “Every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site.” Links need to be ordinary <a> links with an href, and good link text is “descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to the page that it’s on”.
Update the sitemap. “Be sure that your sitemaps are all updated with the new URLs.” A sitemap is a file listing your page addresses for search engines. Google asks for “fully-qualified, absolute URLs” in it, meaning full addresses that start with https.
Move it all at once. For small or medium sites, Google recommends “moving all URLs on your site simultaneously instead of moving one section at a time.” Large sites can move one section at a time.

5. Before launch: lift the test-site blocks and test the redirects

Google notes that “some site owners block all crawling while in development.” At launch, Google says, “Don’t forget to remove any noindex or robots.txt blocks that were only needed for the migration.”

This one matters. A noindex rule tells Google to leave a page out, and Google says it “will drop that page entirely from Google Search results”. A noindex left behind from the test site can take your pages out of Google. The robots.txt file is the one that tells search engines which parts of a site not to read. On the new site it should “correctly reflect the parts you want blocked from crawling”.

Then test the redirects. Google says, “You can use the URL Inspection Tool for testing individual URLs”, or command line tools or scripts for large numbers of addresses.

6. After launch: check Search Console

Search Console is Google’s dashboard for your site. Google says, “Search Console is your friend, especially during a site move.” Here’s what to check.

Sitemaps report. Submit the new sitemap, then “view how many URLs submitted in a sitemap have been indexed”. Indexed means stored by Google and able to show in search. Submitting is “merely a hint” and doesn’t guarantee Google downloads it.
Page indexing report. It “shows how many URLs on your site have been crawled and indexed by Google.” Google says to “Check regularly for any unexpected crawl errors”. You’ll see reasons such as “Page with redirect”, which is normal for an old address. You may also see “Not found (404)”, “Soft 404” and “URL marked ‘noindex’”. Google says “404 responses are not necessarily a problem, if the page has been removed without any replacement,” and recommends “fixing only 404 errors that you link to yourself or list in a sitemap.”
Performance report. It shows “how your site performs in Google Search results”: clicks, impressions (how many times your site appeared in results), click-through rate and average position. After a move, Google says it “would start showing the URLs on the new site getting search impressions and clicks.” “The newest data can be preliminary”.
URL Inspection. It shows Google’s indexed version of a page, can test the live page, and lets you ask Google to index it. There’s a daily limit, and Google says a request “does not guarantee that the page will appear in the Google Index.”

Comparing before and after. Google’s advice on traffic drops is to “Change the date range to include 16 months” and “Compare the drop period to a similar period”. It lists “Site moves and migrations” among the causes of a drop.

One warning for 2026. Google’s data anomalies page says a logging error stopped Search Console accurately reporting impressions from May 13, 2025 until April 27, 2026. Impressions, CTR and average position were affected, but “clicks were not affected by the error.” So if your before-and-after reaches back before 27 April 2026, compare clicks, not impressions.

You only need Google’s Change of Address tool if the domain or subdomain changes.

What to expect in the weeks after

Some movement is normal. Google says, “With any significant change to a site, you may experience ranking fluctuations while Google recrawls and reindexes your site.” For “a small to medium-sized website” it “can take a few weeks for most pages to move”. The visibility of your content “may fluctuate temporarily during the move”, and “a site’s rankings will settle down over time.”

Anyone who promises zero movement is promising more than Google does. If you see a drop after the move and it isn’t recovering, Google’s traffic-drop guide has a troubleshooting section for it.

A faster site helps, but it isn’t a shortcut. Google’s “good” marks for Core Web Vitals, its measures of loading, responding and holding still, are LCP within 2.5 seconds, INP under 200 milliseconds and CLS under 0.1. Google says Core Web Vitals “are used by our ranking systems”, but it “always seeks to show the most relevant content, even if the page experience is sub-par”. So speed helps a rebuild, and it never guarantees rankings.

How CatalystHub handles a rebuild

In short: A rebuild is a new build sized to how many pages your old site has. Blog posts and news articles aren’t counted as designed pages. Your words, images and domain come across, and we set up the redirects. Our Specialist build covers up to 15 pages from $1,500 including GST. Bigger sites get a guide price and an exact price fixed in writing before you pay.

The Specialist build, for sites up to 15 pages. From $1,500 including GST, one-off. It’s made for regulated industries and businesses targeting niche buyers. It includes:

A more advanced custom design, designed for your industry.
Industry compliance baked in (AHPRA, ACCC and GST display rules). AHPRA is the regulator for health practitioners, and ACCC is the consumer watchdog. We build the layout those rules call for, then check it, and your own words and photos, against them before launch. It isn’t legal advice.
Integrations included: booking engines, Google Business schema (code that describes your business to Google) and capability PDFs.
Up to 15 pages and unlimited revisions.
Free hosting with no ongoing cost. A care plan is optional, from $79 a month, and includes 30 minutes of content updates.

It also includes everything in our Standard build: mobile-first design that scores Lighthouse 95+ on mobile (Lighthouse is Google’s speed score), a Word-style editor, SEO set up for Google and AI search, and GA4 analytics. Specialist builds are delivered within 7 business days of the kickoff call. Start a Specialist project.

Priced by the page. Beyond our fixed packages, we quote roughly $100 for each newly designed page up to 15 pages, and a lower price per page above 15. Blog posts and news articles aren’t counted as newly designed pages, and privacy and terms pages generally don’t count either. As a guide, that’s about $1,000 for 10 pages, about $1,900 for 20 and about $2,500 for 30. The exact price is fixed in writing on the 30-minute call before you pay, and so is the timeline for a site over 15 pages. Every build gets unlimited revisions until you’re 100% happy. Hosting is usually free: it’s free on our usual setup, and your quote confirms it. The full breakdown by size is in our guide to website cost by number of pages. Bigger or unusual jobs get a custom quote, and we do those too.

The price is fixed before you pay. A 30-minute call locks the scope, price and timeline, and you get a one-page summary in writing before you pay. Extra pages and development are quoted up front. Bigger builds can be paid 50/50: half at the start, half at launch. Split payments are also available through Klarna.

Redirects and Search Console. On a redesign, we set up redirects from the old page addresses to the new ones. Before launch, we also set up Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools (Microsoft’s version for Bing search) and Google Analytics for free. We keep an eye on them until handover, which is generally one to two weeks after the new site goes live.

Your content comes across. Your words, images and domain move to the new site. Copywriting is offered on every build: we help you refine the words you have, or write them for you. Which existing blog posts and news articles move across is something we work out with you on the call.

Not tied to one platform. We recommend the setup that suits your project, and you choose. If you want WordPress, we build on WordPress. There’s no published WordPress price, so the price is fixed in writing before you pay, and free hosting applies on our usual setup.

You own it. You own the site, its code and content, the domain and the hosting. Every login is handed over at launch: the GitHub repo (where the code is kept), Cloudflare, the TinaCMS editor and GA4. Our no-lock-in promise is written into the contract. More on that in who owns your website. If you skip the care plan, you handle updates and fixes yourself, and you can still call or email us for help at our hourly rate.

Sites we’ve built include a Specialist build for a Perth law firm practising commercial law. See it with our other builds on our work page.

A smaller site? Our Standard build is a custom five-page website for $500 flat including GST. Not sure whether to rebuild at all? Read keep maintaining an old website, or rebuild it?

Your next step

The Specialist build starts at $1,500 including GST, and you can start a Specialist project now. Every package is on our pricing page. Bring your list of old page addresses to the 30-minute call and we’ll size the rebuild from it.

Frequently asked questions

Will I lose my Google rankings if I redesign my website? Google says you “may experience ranking fluctuations while Google recrawls and reindexes your site”, and that “a site’s rankings will settle down over time.”

Google also says 301 and other permanent redirects “don’t cause a loss in PageRank”, so use them wherever an address changes.

How long should I keep 301 redirects after a redesign? Google says, “Keep the redirects for as long as possible, generally at least 1 year.”

Should I redirect old pages to my home page? No. Google says, “Don’t redirect many old URLs to one irrelevant single URL destination, such as the home page of the new site.” Redirect each old page to its closest new page. If there isn’t one, let it return a 404 or 410.

How long does it take Google to pick up a redesigned site? Google says “a small to medium-sized website can take a few weeks for most pages to move”. In Search Console, the Page indexing report shows how many URLs on your site have been crawled and indexed by Google.

Do I need Google’s Change of Address tool for a redesign? Only if the domain or subdomain changes. If you keep your domain, you don’t need it.