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Fixing and redesigning a website works best when you start with what visitors cannot do, then improve the experience without losing useful content or search access. Use these five tips to diagnose the problem, prioritize changes, protect URLs and content, and check whether the new site works after launch.
1. Diagnose the problems visitors need solved
Before changing colors, layouts, or platforms, identify who uses the site, what they come to do, and where the current experience gets in their way. A redesign should address real visitor and business problems—not just make the site look different.
Write down the site’s most important visitor tasks, such as finding a service, understanding a product, contacting your organization, or accessing support. Then inspect the pages and flows involved. Look for unclear labels, missing information, dead ends, hard-to-use forms, and content that is difficult to find. Treat these as hypotheses to check with visitors or other evidence, rather than assuming a visual refresh will solve them.
2. Improve usability, accessibility, security, and speed
Google Search Central’s developer guide identifies security, speed, accessibility, and usability across devices as important site qualities. These are practical redesign requirements, not automatic benefits of changing a theme or CMS. Check real pages and key tasks on desktop and mobile, and use testing to find barriers.
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- Usability: Make navigation and page actions understandable. Check whether people can complete the site’s important tasks without unnecessary steps.
- Accessibility: Review whether page content and controls can be understood and used by people with different needs and assistive technologies.
- Security: Confirm that the site and its infrastructure are appropriately secured.
- Speed: Check page performance on representative devices and connections, then address the actual causes of delay.
- Device support: Verify that layouts, text, images, and interactive elements work across the screen sizes your visitors use.
Fix the obstacles that block essential tasks first. A page that looks polished but remains difficult to use has not solved the underlying problem.
3. Keep content and search access in the design
Plan content and search visibility alongside the new layout. Google Search Essentials recommends helpful, reliable, people-first content and crawlable links. Google’s developer guidance also explains that search systems need textually accessible page content and descriptive titles to understand pages.
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Review what each page communicates
- Keep useful information, and update or remove content based on its purpose and accuracy—not simply because the design is changing.
- Give important pages clear, descriptive titles and visible text that explains what the page is about.
- Use semantic HTML so page structure and meaning are represented in the markup, not only through visual styling.
Check how pages can be discovered
- Use crawlable links for navigation and important destinations.
- Review indexing controls so pages intended to appear in search are not accidentally blocked from indexing.
- Test important pages after implementation to make sure their text and links remain accessible to search systems.
Google Search Central puts the consequence plainly: “If Google Search has trouble understanding your page, you’re possibly missing out on an important source of traffic.” That is a reason to preserve clear content and technical access, not a promise that any particular redesign will increase traffic.
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A design change does not always require new URLs. If URLs or the domain will change, plan the work as a site move: prepare and test the new site, map old URLs to their new destinations, and redirect changed locations. Google’s site-move guidance covers URL-changing migrations, while Digital.gov’s redesign guidance advises using 301 redirects when site structure changes.
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- Decide what is changing. Note whether the project changes page URLs or domain, the CMS and content handling, hosting or infrastructure, or some combination. The migration steps depend on which parts are moving.
- Map old URLs to relevant new pages. Make a destination plan for pages whose addresses will change. Avoid sending every old URL to an unrelated page.
- Test the new site before launch. Check important pages, content, links, and technical behavior while the new site is still being prepared.
- Set redirects for changed addresses. Send visitors and search systems from old URLs to their corresponding new destinations.
- Monitor after the move. Watch traffic and crawl errors so you can find problems such as missing redirects or inaccessible pages.
When practical, avoid combining a domain move, URL restructuring, CMS change, and major layout redesign into one untested leap. Google’s migration guidance suggests separating major moves and layout changes where possible, which can make it easier to identify the source of a problem.
If only hosting is changing
A hosting move without visible URL changes is different from a URL migration. Google’s site-move guidance distinguishes URL changes from infrastructure-only moves; its separate hosting guidance recommends preparing and testing the new infrastructure, monitoring traffic, and retiring the old infrastructure only after the new setup works correctly. Do not apply URL-migration assumptions to a hosting-only move.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.5. Monitor the site after launch
Launch is the start of verification, not proof that the redesign succeeded. Review analytics, search performance, crawl errors, server logs, and user-facing errors. Google recommends monitoring traffic and crawl errors during a site move; for a hosting-only move, it advises checking traffic and confirming that the replacement infrastructure works before retiring the old one.
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- Look for broken links, missing pages, and redirect errors.
- Compare analytics and search performance with the site’s prior patterns, allowing for normal variation rather than assuming every change is caused by the redesign.
- Review server and crawl errors for signs that visitors or search systems cannot reach important content.
- Prioritize fixes according to their effect on essential content and visitor tasks.
Use what you observe to make targeted corrections. If a problem appears after launch, investigate whether it is tied to content, URLs, the CMS, or infrastructure before changing unrelated parts of the site.
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