Website redesign SEO checklist, with WordPress steps

If your business site is getting a new design, the checklist below runs in project order: what to record before the design is approved, what to compare on staging, what to change at launch and what to compare afterward. The table near the end shows which steps need a crawler, Google Search Console data or server access; you can run the rest yourself.

What a redesign changes that Google reads

Every item on the checklist traces back to one of eight things a redesign can change. The table pairs each change with what it can break and the step that catches it.

Google’s site-move guide lists a new layout as a change of its own and advises making such changes “one at a time”, with the layout after a domain move: “move to a new domain, then change your site’s layout.”¹ A redesign that also moves the site to a new domain or platform needs the checks for that move as well, ideally in a separate launch.

Before the design is approved: record the baseline

The baseline is the record of the old site that every later check is compared with, so it has to exist before the first template changes. If you would rather hand that part over, redesigns with these checks built in start from the same baseline.

1. Export Search Console data. Google’s guide to traffic drops works from the Performance report’s “Last 16 months” range and, for longer history, points to “the Search Analytics API or bulk data exports”². Export clicks and impressions by page and by query before anything changes.
2. Build the URL inventory. List every URL with Search Console clicks or impressions, a backlink, an index entry or a place in the current sitemap; this step needs Search Console, a backlink index and a crawler.
3. Crawl the old site. Save each URL’s title, H1, meta description, canonical tag, structured data and internal links. That crawl becomes the old column of the parity sheet, and it shows which elements the old templates leave out: HTTP Archive’s Web Almanac 2025 found a meta description on 67.2% of mobile pages and a canonical tag on 67%³.
4. Group the URLs by template. Note which layout each URL uses, such as service page, blog post or contact page, so each template is checked once against every URL it serves.
5. Decide which URLs change. Keep every URL that can stay. Each URL that changes is mapped to one new page, and the redirect map template has the columns for that pairing.

On staging: compare each old page with its new template

On staging, the parity check sets the baseline crawl beside a crawl of the new templates, URL by URL, and every difference goes on a parity sheet to be fixed or signed off before launch. Working template by template finds a fault once instead of on every page that inherits it. Staging stays closed to search engines while this runs.

Titles and headings come from templates

A template prints the title and headings of every page that uses it, so one wrong setting can rename a whole section of the site. HTTP Archive’s Web Almanac 2025 found a title element on 98.5% of mobile pages but a non-empty H1 on 66%, and it puts some of the missing H1s down to “design choices rather than errors”³.

Google’s title-link guidance warns against “repeated or boilerplate text” in titles⁴. Compare each URL’s old and new title and H1, and treat a title that repeats the site name or the section name across pages as a fault to fix.

Menus, footers and links in the copy

Internal links come from four places a redesign can rebuild at once: the main menu, the footer, sidebars and the copy. Google’s link guidance says it can generally crawl a link only when it is an <a> element with an href attribute, and that “Most links in other formats won’t be parsed and extracted by Google’s crawlers.”⁵ Count the internal links each key page receives before and after, and check that new menus and buttons still print real <a href> links.

Content behind a click, and images in CSS

Text that a new design moves into tabs, sliders or “load more” buttons has to be in the page when it loads. Google’s lazy-loading guidance gives the reason: “Google Search does not interact with your page.”⁶ Google also indexes the mobile version of each page: it “uses the mobile version of a site’s content, crawled with the smartphone agent, for indexing and ranking”⁷. Review each template at phone width as well as on a desktop screen.

Google finds images in the src attribute of <img> elements, and its image guidance states: “Google doesn’t index CSS images.”⁸ A photo that a new design turns into a CSS background drops out of Google Images, so images that should be found stay <img> elements with alt text.

Theme and page-builder changes: the WordPress rows

A new theme rewrites the HTML of every template, and a new page builder rewrites every page laid out with it, while the URLs and the copy can stay exactly as they were. WordPress’s Theme Handbook adds a second risk, in a warning to theme authors about features built into a theme: “Users who build their portfolio with your feature will lose it when they change themes.”⁹ On a WordPress site, run these rows on staging:

1. Preview the theme with your content. The Live Preview link on the Themes screen lets you “preview how your blog will appear with this specific theme version”¹⁰.
2. List what the old theme provided. Custom post types such as portfolios or team pages, shortcodes and structured data that came with the old theme need a plugin or an equivalent in the new theme, or their URLs and markup leave with the old one.
3. Reassign the menus. WordPress menus attach to the locations a theme defines: “If your current theme supports custom menus, you will be able to add your new menu to one of the Theme Locations.”¹¹
4. Recover the widgets. After a theme change, missing widgets sit in the Inactive Widgets area, “where all of your widgets and their settings will have been saved”¹². Footer and sidebar links can be among them.
5. Match the permalink structure. Settings > Permalinks sets the URL pattern of every post, and WordPress’s documentation says that “By default, WordPress uses web URLs that have day and name in them”¹³. A fresh install on staging needs the old site’s setting before any content is moved in.
6. Lay out page-builder pages on purpose. When the page builder changes, each page laid out in the old builder is laid out again in the new one, and each of those pages goes through the parity check as a new template.

Launch day: lift the staging block and switch on the redirects

Launch day turns staging settings into live settings, so the robots rules come first. In WordPress, ticking the “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” box under Settings > Reading has, since version 5.3, added a noindex, nofollow robots meta tag to the head of the site’s pages¹⁴. Google’s noindex documentation spells out the result for a page that keeps the tag: “Google will drop that page entirely from Google Search results, regardless of whether other sites link to it.”¹⁵

The robots.txt file needs the same check, because a block can outlast its fix: Google “generally caches the contents of robots.txt file for up to 24 hours”¹⁶. Then run launch QA in this order:

1. Redirects. Every changed URL returns one 301 redirect to its mapped page. If an earlier redesign already redirects an old URL, change that redirect so it goes straight to the new mapped page, and no URL passes through two redirects.
2. Canonical tags and internal links. Google’s site-move guide asks for a self-referencing canonical tag on each new URL and says to “Change the internal links on the new site from the old URLs to the new URLs.”¹
3. Sitemap. The XML sitemap lists the live URLs only, and it is submitted in Search Console.
4. Tracking. Open one page of each template and watch the visit arrive in Google Analytics’ Realtime report, which Google offers to “Verify that the measurement code is working on your site or app”¹⁷.

After launch: what to compare, and for how long

After launch, compare like with like: Search Console clicks and impressions for each page over a period after launch, set against the same pages and an equal period in the baseline export. If clicks fell and the cause is not clear, the traffic-drop decision tree separates a redesign fault from a Google update or a tracking change.

Speed is a template property too. Google’s Core Web Vitals guidance sets three targets: Largest Contentful Paint “within the first 2.5 seconds” of loading, Interaction to Next Paint of “less than 200 milliseconds” and Cumulative Layout Shift of “less than 0.1”¹⁸. Search Console’s Core Web Vitals report groups similar pages and states each group’s figures over “the last 28 days”¹⁹, so until 28 days after launch those figures still include page loads from before it.

Redirects stay in place long after launch day: Google’s site-move guide says to keep them “for as long as possible, generally at least 1 year”¹.

Which checks you can run yourself

Several rows need nothing more than WordPress admin access and a browser. The rows that need a crawler, the Search Console export or server access are the ones to hand over if nobody on your side has them.

When to bring in help for a redesign

If organic search brings in inquiries or sales, bring help in before the design is approved, while URLs and templates can still change without rework. Google’s advice on hiring an SEO names a site redesign as “a great time to hire” and adds “the earlier, the better”, so that the site is “designed to be search engine-friendly from the bottom up”²⁰.

There are three ways to hand the work over:

• The redesign and the checks together. The URL-Verified Redesign covers the URL inventory, the redirect map, the parity check on staging, launch QA and the crawls after launch, from $5,990 / £4,790.
• Your developer or agency builds the redesign. SEO-only checks for a developer-built redesign cover the map, the parity sheet and the crawls around launch; the SEO Migration Package is from $1,980 / £1,560.
• You are the agency. The same checks run as redesign QA for agency clients, with the reports in your agency’s name instead of SEO Migration Studio’s.

To budget, compare published redesign prices by provider type, including what the SEO line item covers. If the redesign also moves the site to a new platform or domain, the migration checklist adds the checks for that move.