WEBSITE RELAUNCH · CHECKLIST
The checklist worked through before every relaunch
Twelve checks, in the order they are done. The first three belong at the start of the project rather than the end: the address inventory is what the new site is drawn against, and a redirect map retrofitted to a finished structure is the usual reason one ends up incomplete.
Export every address the old site has
Pull the full URL list from the sitemap, the server logs, Search Console and a crawl, because no single one of those four is complete. This list is the document the entire relaunch is checked against, and everything below refers back to it.
Note what each address is worth
Add impressions, clicks and inbound links to every URL on the list. Without this, the decision about which pages to merge or drop is guesswork, and the page quietly dropped is regularly the one bringing in half the traffic.
Map every old address to a new one
Each URL gets a destination on the new site, and the ones with no obvious counterpart get a decision rather than a default. A redirect to the homepage is treated as a page being given up, because that is what search engines make of it.
Move the content that earns the positions first
A page ranks because it answers something at a certain depth, so the new version needs to answer it at least as fully. Shortening a top-ranking page during the redesign costs the position it holds, and that is the most common self-inflicted relaunch loss after broken redirects.
Carry titles and descriptions across deliberately
A page that ranks well has a title Google has been showing for a long time, and rewriting all of them in the same week makes it impossible to attribute any later movement. Change the ones that are genuinely wrong and leave the rest alone until after the launch has settled.
Check the structured data on the new pages
Rich results disappear when the markup describing them does not survive the move, so every page that had an FAQ, a product or a breadcrumb needs the same node afterwards. Validating it before the switch is far cheaper than noticing the lost rich result weeks later.
Remove the staging noindex, then check it twice
A staging environment is normally blocked from indexing by robots.txt or a noindex header, and that block travelling to production is the single most destructive relaunch mistake there is. It removes the entire site from search results within days, it looks exactly like an algorithmic penalty from the outside, and it is invisible in the browser.
Verify canonicals point at the new site
A canonical tag left pointing at the old domain or at a staging host tells search engines the page they are looking at is not the real one. This survives a redirect check unnoticed, because the page loads correctly and only the tag inside it is wrong.
Carry images, PDFs and downloads across
Documents and images have their own addresses, get linked from other sites, and rank in image and file search. They are also the assets most often forgotten in a migration, because a page inventory built from HTML pages does not list them.
Rebuild analytics and its conversion goals
A new site means new page paths, and every goal, funnel and event defined against the old paths stops recording on the day of the switch. Rebuilding them before go-live is what makes the weeks after the relaunch comparable with the weeks before it.
Test on real devices and real connections
Check the new site on iOS and Android, in Safari, Chrome and Firefox, and on a throttled connection rather than office wifi. Forms are worth submitting for real on each, since a contact form that silently fails is the most expensive bug a business site can ship.
Switch at an agreed time, then watch and change nothing
Lower the DNS time-to-live in advance, switch at a time somebody is available to react, then submit the new sitemap and watch crawl errors and positions for a fortnight. Any change made in those two weeks becomes impossible to tell apart from the relaunch itself.
Questions about the checklist
What is the most common mistake in a website relaunch?
Two compete for first place. Old addresses that lead nowhere after the switch, which loses the positions those pages held, and a staging noindex or robots.txt block that travels to production, which removes the entire site from search results within days. The second is rarer and far more destructive, because it is invisible in a browser and looks like a penalty from the outside.
How long before go-live should the checklist be started?
The first three points belong at the very beginning of the project, not at the end, because the address inventory is what the new sitemap is drawn against. Starting the redirect map after the new site is built means retrofitting it to a structure that was decided without it, which is where most incomplete redirect maps come from.
Do we need to redirect every single old URL?
Every URL that has value needs a decision, which is not the same as a redirect. A page with traffic or inbound links gets a redirect to its real counterpart. A page with neither, such as an old campaign address nobody links to, can be allowed to return a not-found status. That is an honest signal and it is better than redirecting it somewhere irrelevant.
How long does a website take to recover after a relaunch?
Expect noticeable movement for two to four weeks while search engines recrawl and reassign the redirected addresses, with larger sites taking longer simply because there is more to recrawl. Movement inside the first fortnight is normal and is not on its own a reason to change anything. Reacting to it is how a recoverable dip becomes a permanent one.
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