Rebuilding a site that already gets traffic is risky. Most of the damage comes from a few avoidable mistakes, not from the redesign itself. I rebuilt the Creston Group website this autumn, and this is the order I worked in. I will say now that it is early days there and I have no traffic figures to quote.
Before: write down what you have
Export your top pages and search queries from Search Console and note your current enquiries. Crawl the site and keep a list of every URL. Without a baseline you cannot tell later whether the new site is better or worse, and you will be guessing.
Mark the pages that earn traffic or links. Those are the ones you do not experiment with.
During: protect what already works
- Keep URLs where you can. If one must change, set up a permanent 301 redirect to the closest matching page, never to the home page.
- Carry over titles, descriptions and headings, and improve them on purpose rather than by accident.
- Keep internal links, schema and image alt text. Rebuilds quietly drop these.
- Keep the test site out of Google, then remember to undo that at launch. Forgetting is the classic mistake.
At launch
- Check the live site is indexable and the robots file is right.
- Submit the sitemap in Search Console.
- Click through the redirects and look for broken links.
- Make sure forms, phone links and analytics work, because a redesign that breaks the contact form is worse than the old site.
After: watch closely, stay calm
Look at Search Console every day for the first two weeks. A small dip while Google reprocesses everything is normal. A large drop that lasts is not, and it usually points back to a redirect or an indexing mistake you can fix.
Structure for the audience, not the org chart
The one design lesson I would add: on Creston we organised the site around the three services people come for rather than around the company. Visitors arrive wanting one thing, and they should reach it in a click.
If the site brings in real business, it is worth having someone treat SEO as part of the build. That is how we work: see our web development and SEO pages, or talk to us before you start.