Website Redesign: 4 Questions for Your Developer Before Launch

A new website almost always looks better than the old one. But enquiries are not brought in by looks alone. They come from page addresses that Google already knows, from counters that record enquiries, and from ads that lead to specific addresses. In a move, all of that is easy to lose, and you find out only when the phone goes quiet.

A developer usually thinks about design and layout. Search and advertising are worth asking about separately. Below are four questions to ask before launch and one for your ads after it. For each: what the answer means and what you can check yourself, without a programmer. We checked the rules for moving a site against Google’s documentation on 18 October 2026.

1. Will the page addresses change?

A page address (URL) is what Google recognises a page by and builds its history on. If /uslugi/remont/ becomes /services/repair/ on the new site, search treats it as a new page and the old one as gone.

Google asks you to map old addresses to new ones and set up permanent redirects from the old to the new. A redirect is a rule that tells the browser and search: “this page now lives here”. Important details from Google’s guide to site moves:

• don’t send many old addresses to one irrelevant page, such as the home page: each old page should lead to its matching new page;
• keep the redirects for as long as possible, which Google says is generally at least a year;
• if the domain (the site address) changes, you submit a separate change of address in Search Console for the old site; it is not needed for a move from http to https or from www to non-www.

What to do yourself. Before launch, open your-site-address/sitemap.xml (the site map; not every site has one) and save the list of pages to a file. After launch, open five old addresses, including the page with the most enquiries. Each should lead to the right new page, not to an error and not to the home page.

Ask your developer: will there be an “old address → new address” table, and who is making it?

2. Will the tracking be moved?

Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, the Meta pixel, forms, phone numbers: all of this has to be set up again on the new site, and this is where it is most often forgotten. Then the ads keep running while enquiries stop being counted. We covered what should be connected in the article What Should Be Connected to Your Website.

A practice that several agencies recommend: put the same code on the new site (the same Analytics data stream ID, which starts with “G-”, and the same Tag Manager container) rather than creating a new one. Otherwise your data history splits into “before” and “after”. We found no separate rule on this in Google’s documentation, so this is practice, not a requirement.

What to do yourself. After launch, send a test enquiry from your own phone. It should arrive in your email or CRM, and you should see it in the Google Analytics real-time report.

Ask your developer: which codes and forms exactly are you moving, and who checks that an enquiry arrives?

3. Who will lift the block on the test site?

While the new site is being built, it is usually closed off from Google so the draft doesn’t end up in search. That is right. The trouble is that the block is forgotten on launch day, and the new site stays invisible to search. Google says plainly: before launch, remove the noindex and robots.txt blocks that were only needed for the move.

What to do yourself, on launch day:

1. Open your-site-address/robots.txt. Under the line User-agent: * there should be no line Disallow: /: it forbids robots from visiting the whole site.
2. Open the home page, press Ctrl+U (page source) and use Ctrl+F to look for the word noindex. If it’s there, the page is asking Google not to show it.

Look at both places, because they work differently. According to Google’s documentation, robots.txt is not a mechanism for keeping a web page out of Google: to keep a page out of results you need noindex or a password. More on this in the article One Checkbox and Your Site Is Gone From Google.

Ask your developer: who lifts the block, when, and will they tell me once it’s done?

4. What else changes at the same time, and when is the launch?

Google advises changing one thing at a time: don’t move the domain, the platform, the address structure and the design all at once. Then, if traffic drops, it is easy to tell why. If everything changed together, you will be hunting for the cause blindly.

The second point is timing. Several agencies advise launching in the off-season, not just before a promotion or a demand peak. That is practitioners’ advice, not Google’s, but the logic is simple: a dip after a move is possible, and it is better if it doesn’t coincide with your main season.

How long will the dip last? The sources disagree here, and we won’t pick for you:

• Google’s documentation: a small or medium-sized site can take a few weeks for most pages to move, and large sites longer. Google gives no exact figure there;
• according to a retelling (we have not seen the original) of a table by a Google analyst at the Search Central Live conference in Barcelona on 30 September – 2 October 2026: a site move typically takes one to three months, and in the worst case six months to a year or more;
• agency blogs: rankings come back after three weeks to a month.

The spread is wide, so leave a margin: treat a month as the optimistic scenario, not a guarantee. Site size and the number of changes affect the timing most.

After launch, Google advises monitoring how traffic to the new site changes: Search Console and ordinary web analytics are there for this. So after a week and after a month, compare enquiries with your “before” number, and don’t draw conclusions from the first two days: swings after a move are normal.

What to do yourself. Write down the number of enquiries and calls for the month before launch. Without that number you won’t know whether things really got worse or it just feels that way.

Ask your developer: what else is changing besides the design, and what date is the launch set for?

What about your ads?

Ads lead to specific addresses. If after the redesign such an address returns a 404 error (“page not found”), Google Ads disapproves the ad under the “Destination not working” policy. The ad simply stops showing, and no money is spent, so it is easy to miss for several days.

In our experience, the problem is most often not the redesign itself but that the new site structure was never checked against the addresses in the ads. So the check is simple.

What to do yourself, on launch day. Open your ad in Google Ads and click the final URL. Does the page open? Are the price and the offer on it the same as in the ad text? If not, write to your developer and change the address in the ad.

Summary

1. Will the page addresses change, and is there an “old → new” table?
2. Will the tracking be moved, and who checks that an enquiry arrives?
3. Who lifts the block on the test site on launch day?
4. What else changes at the same time, and does the launch fall in your busy season?
5. Do the addresses in your ads work?

The whole check takes an evening: a test enquiry, five old addresses, robots.txt and the final URLs in your ads. Other site checks are collected in the website checklist before advertising. How we run ads while a site is changing is covered in the section on search advertising.

Want a free audit of your Google Ads account? Send us a request: we will check your ads before and after the site move and tell you whether they lead where they should.