Website Relaunch
Relaunch without burning rankings.
Most agencies treat a relaunch as a redesign with the SEO bolted on at the end. That's why most relaunches lose 30-60% of their organic traffic in the first month. We treat it as a migration: redirect map, schema preserved, internal-link equivalence, crawl monitoring through launch week. Same fixed price as a new build, but with rankings intact.
The relaunch trap
Three failure modes that kill organic traffic.
Almost every botched relaunch fails on one of these. Most agencies don't know what they don't know.
No redirect map
URLs change. Old URLs return 404 or 410. Google re-crawls, finds dead pages, drops them from the index. Existing backlinks point at nothing. Months of authority lost in days.
Content reset
The new site replaces the old copy with shorter, prettier blocks. Google has to re-evaluate every page from scratch, and pages that used to rank for long-tail queries lose the wording that earned them.
Signals stripped
Schema markup gone. Breadcrumbs gone. Internal links broken. The structural signals that told Google what your site was about are silently removed in the new template.
The five silent risks in detail - and the process that protects rankings
How we do it
Six checkpoints between brief and launch.
1 · Crawl & baseline
Full crawl of the existing site, exported from Search Console: every indexed URL, ranked queries per URL, internal-link graph, schema in place. The reference Google currently has.
2 · Redirect map
Every old URL mapped to a new equivalent. 1:1 wherever possible, consolidated to canonical groups where the new architecture flattens depth. Validated against the crawl baseline before launch.
3 · Content equivalence
For each ranking page, we keep the long-tail wording that earned the rank, refactored into the new design, not deleted. Where we cut, we cut deliberately and document why.
4 · Schema preserved or upgraded
Organization, Service, Article, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList, re-implemented in the new templates. We never strip structured data; we only add to it.
5 · Staging QA
New site lives on a staging hostname for the entire test phase. Robots-blocked. Lighthouse, accessibility, schema, redirect-map all green before DNS flip.
6 · Launch monitoring
Search Console crawl-stats, indexation report and ranking monitoring for the first 30 days post-launch. Any anomaly gets a same-day fix.
Real example
What this looks like in practice.
A Munich-area trades business inherited a site from a previous agency that had migrated without redirects. A page that previously held a top Munich position for an electrical-modernisation query was wiped out of the index. We rebuilt the redirect logic, restored crawlable structure and started recovery, alongside fixing 6 critical compliance gaps the same agency left behind.
Rucker Elektro: compliance recovered and visibility tripled in 7 weeks
Relaunch already done and rankings gone? See relaunch recovery
- Inherited damage: ranking lost, no redirects, GDPR risk, contact form pointing at the previous agency.
- Recovery sprint: 7 weeks. Compliance stack rebuilt. Redirect map restored. Content restructured.
- Result: visibility nearly tripled. Top 10 for relevant Munich queries.
- Live test on launch day of new wallbox-subsidy law: article indexed within 24 hours, four times the daily click average of the prior six weeks.
When this is NOT for you
Two signals it’s the wrong fit.
- You're starting fresh with no existing site or rankings, a new build is simpler and probably cheaper.
- The existing site has zero organic visibility and you don't care to preserve any of it. In that case, just commission a new website without the migration overhead.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions.
Three reasons in this order: (1) the URL structure changes and no redirects are set, (2) the page contents change so much that Google has to re-evaluate everything from scratch, (3) the new template removes structured signals (schema, internal links, headings) the old site had built up. We avoid all three by treating the relaunch as a migration, not just a redesign.
A redirect map covering every old URL → new URL, validated against Search Console crawl data. Schema preserved or improved, never removed. Internal linking patterns documented and migrated. Crawl-rate monitoring through the launch week and beyond. We also stage the new site on a separate hostname for full QA before flipping DNS.
Sometimes yes, often no. If your CMS is the source of the problem (slow, ugly admin, fragile, vulnerable), we replace it. If it works and just needs better templates, we keep it. We make this call after the audit, not before.
That is the most common starting point. We document the inherited defects (compliance, performance, schema, redirects, content thinness) and rebuild what is salvageable. Sometimes the cleanest path is to start fresh; sometimes it is surgical replacement of templates and content.
Same range as a new website: 8-12 weeks. The discovery phase is shorter (you already have content and traffic to learn from); the migration phase is longer (redirect map, technical equivalence checks, careful launch). Net: same timeline.
Who leads the relaunch
Patrick Sosath, founder & strategist.
Trained IT business specialist, Management & Technology at OTH Regensburg. Background in B2B software and IT systems.
Relaunches are high-risk projects precisely because SEO and development decisions interact. We run both sides, which means redirect mapping and technical build decisions are made from one hand - eliminating the handoff gaps where rankings typically break.
Planning a relaunch?
Send us your existing URL. We’ll tell you what’s safe to change.
30-minute review of the existing site, the proposed scope and the realistic risks. Free if it leads to a project, otherwise charged at clarity-session rate.
Get in touch
Send us a quick message.
Two-line brief, real reply within a working day. Or use the full enquiry form on the contact page.