When to check a website's SEO: what to review after a redesign or a migration

A site can lose Google traffic overnight without anyone touching the content. All it takes is a template change that leaves every page with the same title, or a migration that forgets the redirects. Google warns about this in its guide to moving a site: with any significant change you may see ranking fluctuations while it recrawls and reindexes the site. That is why you should check website SEO after a redesign, and before it too.

1 year

Redirects

keep them at least that long

301

Redirect type

permanent, server-side

temporary

Fluctuations

while Google recrawls

Source: Google Search Central, site moves with URL changes

View the data as a table

Redirects	1 year | keep them at least that long
Redirect type	301 | permanent, server-side
Fluctuations	temporary | while Google recrawls

When to check a website's SEO

Besides a routine monthly review, there are moments when checking your website's SEO is a must:

Moment	Main risk
Redesign or new template	Titles, H1s or descriptions that disappear or repeat
Platform change (for example, to another CMS)	New URLs without redirects
Domain change or move to HTTPS	Lost signals if the redirects fail
New plugin or theme	Noindex tags or canonicals added by mistake
Sharp drop in organic traffic	A block or technical error nobody noticed

Before the change: take a snapshot of the site

1. List your important URLs. Export them from Search Console's Performance report: the pages with the most clicks in recent months.
2. Analyze each one with our tool to check website SEO and save each page's title, description, H1 and canonical.
3. Prepare the redirect map, from old URL to new URL, for every page whose address changes.

Check website SEO after a redesign, starting on launch day

• 301 redirects from each old URL to its new equivalent, not to the home page. Google recommends keeping them for at least one year.
• robots.txt: make sure the staging site's Disallow: / is gone.
• noindex: many systems turn it on for sites under construction. Check that it has been removed.
• Updated sitemap with the new URLs, submitted in Search Console.

✓▣Free toolFree SEO Checker: on-page SEO analyzerPaste a URL and check its title, meta description, headings, canonical, languages, images and links.Use tool →

Check website SEO after a redesign: compare with the snapshot

Run your important URLs through the tool to check website SEO again and compare with what you saved:

• Are the title and the description still unique, or does the new template repeat them?
• Is the H1 still there, or did it end up inside an image?
• Does the canonical point to the new URL or still to the old one?
• Does the "final URL" arrive in a single hop or go through several redirects?

Checking website SEO after a redesign does not end on day one: also review Search Console's indexing report over the following weeks. A rise in "not found (404)" or "page with redirect" pages tells you what slipped through. To measure the impact, follow the steps to check your website's SEO with Search Console.

The routine monthly review

Outside of big changes, checking your website's SEO once a month with a 10-minute checklist is enough to catch in time what changes without warning: a plugin that updates or a page someone edited. For a deeper review, every six to twelve months, run a full SEO audit.