Web
Plan backwards from the outcome you need, protect what already works, and treat URL and content parity as a delivery requirement rather than a launch-week task. Most redesign traffic losses are planning failures, not surprises.
Which pages produce enquiries, which earn search visibility, which are cited or linked. Redesigns lose traffic mainly by discarding or diluting pages nobody realised were performing, and that is preventable with a week of analysis.
Each existing address needs a destination: kept, redirected to the closest equivalent, or deliberately retired. Redirect chains, loops and mass redirects to the homepage are the specific patterns that cause damage.
Server-rendered output, structured content, performance budgets, accessible components and a heading structure that survives editing are all far cheaper to specify than to retrofit.
Plan the launch as a monitored event.
Compare rendered content against the old site on key templates, verify indexing and structured data in the first days, and keep the old analytics available for comparison. The first fortnight is when a fixable problem is still cheap.
Inventory what performs, map every URL to a destination before design starts, keep content depth on pages that earn visibility, preserve server-rendered output, and verify indexing in the first fortnight after launch.
Only with a reason. Doing both together means that if traffic drops you cannot tell which change caused it. Sequencing them is slower and makes diagnosis possible.
Plan backwards from the outcome you need, protect what already works, and treat URL and content parity as a delivery requirement rather than a launch-week task. Most redesign traffic losses are planning failures, not surprises.
You have read what we think. If you want to know what it means for your case specifically, describe it and we will tell you which parts of how to plan a website redesign actually apply — and which do not.
