How to redesign a website without losing your Google rankings

A website redesign does not have to cost a small business its Google rankings, and it can earn better ones. A redesign most often loses rankings when pages move to new web addresses without redirects telling Google where they went. It gains rankings when the new site fixes the problems on the old one that kept Google from understanding the business. In October 2026, Cobalt Bloom checked the old pages of 55 Los Angeles small-business websites: 36% had changed the addresses of at least 30% of their pages, and 75% of those left most of the old addresses showing "page not found" or sending visitors to the home page.

Updated: October 23, 2026. Written by Eric Levine, founder of Cobalt Bloom.

What are the key findings?

• Old pages often break in a rebuild. Cobalt Bloom checked 55 Los Angeles small-business websites against saved copies of their pages from 2024 and the first half of 2025. 36% of them had changed the addresses of at least 30% of those pages. On 75% of those, most of the old addresses now show "page not found" or send visitors to the home page.
• Fixing the old site's problems pays off. In Cobalt Bloom's study of 100 local searches (https://getcobaltbloom.com/guides/why-isnt-my-website-showing-up-on-google), 87% of business websites on Google's first page named their service in the home page title, against 66% of those that did not make it. Moss, a coworking space in Venice Beach, fixed a title like that in its 2026 rebuild, and its case study (https://ericgrows.com/case-studies/moss-venice) reports it rose from about fifth to first on Google for coworking in Venice Beach.

How did Cobalt Bloom check?

Cobalt Bloom compared saved copies of small-business websites' old pages with what those addresses do today. The study started with 87 Los Angeles small-business websites from Cobalt Bloom's earlier study (https://getcobaltbloom.com/guides/why-isnt-my-website-showing-up-on-google): non-chain businesses in ten categories, from dentists and plumbers to restaurants and law firms. The Internet Archive had copies of pages from 2024 and the first half of 2025 for 66 of those sites. Up to 40 old page addresses per site were tried in October 2026; each still worked, forwarded to another page, sent visitors to the home page, or showed "page not found." Leftover template pages, login pages and home listing pages were left out, which left 1,136 old pages on 55 sites. The Internet Archive saves only some pages, so the results are a sample, and a missing page may have been removed on purpose.

The Moss figures come from the Moss case study (https://ericgrows.com/case-studies/moss-venice) and from Cobalt Bloom's comparison of public copies of Moss's home page before and after its rebuild.

Step 1: What should you find out about the current site before anything is designed?

Get an SEO audit of the current site, so the new site fixes its problems instead of copying them over. Many small-business websites have problems their owners cannot see, and a redesign is the cheapest moment to fix them. Eric Grows Companies offers an SEO audit at https://ericgrows.com/audit.

Moss shows what that can do. Moss already had more than 150 members and a 4.9-star Google rating. Its general manager rebuilt the website herself after taking Build Your Website with Claude Code, a course from Eric Grows Companies (https://ericgrows.com); Eric Levine runs Eric Grows Companies and also runs Cobalt Bloom. In July 2026, a check of Moss's old site that she ran in the course found:

• A home page title, "moss | home for your ideas," that never said coworking or Venice. The title is the blue headline Google shows for a page in its results.
• 6 of its 16 pages were leftover duplicates, near-identical copies competing with the real pages.
• The phone number and hours appeared only inside the chat window's code, where Google could not read them.
• The membership page showed two different price tables and still mentioned a launch party from 2023.
• No structured data, the behind-the-scenes code that tells search engines what kind of business a site belongs to and where it is (https://getcobaltbloom.com/glossary#structured-data).

The rebuild fixed each of those problems. What a search engine reads on Moss's home page before and after, from public copies:

The new site went live in September 2026. By then Moss had risen from about fifth to first on Google for coworking in Venice Beach, and from not appearing at all to first for "wellness coworking Los Angeles." Moss reports that its weekly tour bookings doubled with no ads. One business's result is not a promise for another's, but it shows what a rebuild can do. Cobalt Bloom's step-by-step write-up of each fix is at https://getcobaltbloom.com/blog/how-the-moss-method-works.

What to ask the designer to check on the current site:

• Does each page's title say what the business does and where?
• Are the phone number, address and hours in the page text, not only inside an image, a chat window or a pop-up?
• Is there one version of every fact: one page per topic, one set of prices, nothing out of date?
• Does the site have structured data with the business type, address, phone and hours?

Cobalt Bloom's guide to why websites don't show up on Google covers what else helps a site show up when customers search, at https://getcobaltbloom.com/guides/why-isnt-my-website-showing-up-on-google. For the structured data, see Cobalt Bloom's guide to local business schema at https://getcobaltbloom.com/guides/local-business-schema, and for Google's AI answers, its guide to AI Overviews and AI Mode at https://getcobaltbloom.com/guides/how-to-get-your-business-into-google-ai-overviews.

Step 2: How do you list every page a website has now?

Make a spreadsheet of every page on the current site and its address, with room for a second column; in Step 4 that column gets each page's new address. A designer can pull the list from three places:

• The sitemap, the file that lists a site's pages for search engines, usually at yourbusiness.com/sitemap.xml. It looks technical in a browser, but only the web addresses matter.
• Google Search Console, Google's free tool for site owners. Its Performance report shows which pages Google sends visitors to, and those pages matter most. An owner without Search Console can ask the designer to set it up and give the owner access.
• The page list in the tool the site was built with, such as Wix, Squarespace or WordPress.

Step 3: Why should page addresses and wording stay the same in a redesign?

Google keeps track of each page separately, by its exact address. Say a teeth whitening page lives at yourpractice.com/teeth-whitening. It may have spent years earning its spot on Google, partly because other websites link to it. If the redesign moves it to yourpractice.com/services/whitening, Google sees the old page disappear and an unknown new one appear, and the page's spot on Google does not move over by itself.

So ask the designer to keep each page's address the same wherever possible; most website tools let them set it by hand. Keep the words that bring visitors in, too: if the old page said "teeth whitening in Pasadena" in its title and text, the new one should still say it.

Step 4: How should pages that move be redirected?

Set up a permanent redirect (a "301 redirect") from every old address to the closest matching new page, not to the home page. A redirect is a rule that forwards anyone who visits an old address, people and Google alike, to the new page. On the sites Cobalt Bloom checked, many old addresses had none: 31% of the old pages no longer loaded at their old address. Only 35% of those forwarded visitors to another working page; 58% showed "page not found," and 6% sent visitors to the home page.

In the second column of the page list, write the new address each old page should go to, and have the designer set up a permanent redirect for each one. Google recommends a permanent redirect when a page has moved for good (https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/301-redirects); most website tools have a Redirects setting for it. Google also says that if many old pages all forward to the home page, it may treat them as broken (https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/site-move-with-url-changes). A page that is gone for good with nothing to replace it, such as a promotion that ended, can show "page not found." Decide that on purpose, and note it on the list.

Changing the web address too? The same rules apply, to every page at once. When Cobalt Bloom renamed itself from Inlay Web on October 9, 2026, it moved from inlayweb.com to getcobaltbloom.com, and every old address forwards permanently to the same page on the new domain: inlayweb.com/about goes to getcobaltbloom.com/about. In the one ChatGPT answer checked each day, ChatGPT described the business as Inlay Web on October 21, 2026 and used the new name and site on October 22. For a domain change, also have the designer use the Change of Address tool in Search Console to tell Google (https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/site-move-with-url-changes).

Step 5: What should you test and watch after the new site launches?

Test the old addresses on launch day and keep watching Search Console for a few weeks. On the day the new site goes live:

1. Try a handful of old addresses from the page list in a browser. Each one should land on the right new page.
2. Have the designer submit the new sitemap in Search Console, on its Sitemaps page.
3. Check the listings. Make sure the Google Business Profile, Yelp and other listings link to pages that still work.
4. Keep the redirects for at least a year, as Google advises, so it can move everything over to the new addresses (https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/site-move-with-url-changes).
5. Watch for broken pages. For the next few weeks, check Search Console's Pages report for pages marked "Not found (404)." 404 is the code for "page not found," and each one is an old address that still needs a redirect.

What should you ask a web designer before a redesign?

1. What did you find wrong with the current site, and how does the new one fix it?
2. Will every old page address either stay the same or forward to the matching new page?
3. Can I see the list of old and new addresses before launch?
4. Will the new site have structured data, and my phone number and hours in the page text?
5. Who will test the old addresses on launch day, and watch Search Console afterward?
6. Will the redirects stay in place for at least a year?

Cobalt Bloom is being built to handle this for small businesses: check the old site, carry every page over, and check every month that Google has the new one right. It has not launched yet; its waitlist is open at https://getcobaltbloom.com/#waitlist.