A website redesign can improve your site’s appearance, conversion rate, visitor experience, and more — but it also can put your search engine rankings and traffic at risk.

During the redesign process, you might change your domain name, subdomains, page-level optimization, and URL structure. You might add content or move it within your site’s hierarchy or remove it altogether. You might also add new sections or new features and run into some technical issues. While it’s unlikely that your redesign will include all of these changes, any one of them can be problematic for your rankings and organic traffic without careful planning and execution.

To ensure you reap the benefits of a redesign while avoiding the potential pitfalls, we’ll flush out a website redesign SEO strategy in this post. By following the checklist below, you can not only retain your existing search engine rankings and traffic — you can improve them.

The best SEO checklist will blend content planning and execution with technical aspects like code and schema. You can’t have solid SEO without combining traditional content marketing with a solid process and a very strong codebase.

1. Analyze your current site.

2. Inventory your high-performing content.

3. Determine your SEO goals.

4. Optimize your existing content.

5. Set up 301 redirects.

6. Update your site architecture.

7. Optimize your page speed.

8. Update your XML sitemap.

Website redesign SEO checklist was filled with standard items that virtually any developer or website owner can execute.

Many of these steps are done by a human or with a free SEO tool like Google Search Console. During a website redesign, aim for more than avoiding an SEO disaster. Following the checklist above can help you not only retain but improve your search engine rankings and traffic.