Honestly, most people treat a website redesign like buying new furniture. You pick a couch you like, throw out the old one, and hope the room looks better. But the internet isn't a living room. It’s an ecosystem. If you just "swap things out" because you’re bored of the hex codes or your boss thinks the hero image looks "dated," you’re probably going to tank your rankings. I've seen it happen. Big brands spend six figures on a flashy new UI only to realize two months later that their organic traffic dropped by 40% because they forgot to map their redirects or stripped out the text that was actually doing the heavy lifting.
If you want to know how to redesign a website that actually makes money and stays on Google’s good side, you have to stop thinking about "pretty" and start thinking about "functional." Google Discover, specifically, is a finicky beast. It doesn't care if your site is a masterpiece of modern minimalism if the layout shifts three times while the page is loading. You need a mix of technical precision and actual, valuable content that humans want to click on.
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The "Invisible" Assets You’re About to Break
Before you even touch a line of CSS, you need to audit what you already have. This is where most projects fail. People look at a page and think, "this looks old." They don't look at the data to see that "old" page is responsible for 20% of their annual revenue.
Start with a full crawl. Use something like Screaming Frog or Ahrefs. You need a list of every single URL on your current site. If you change a URL—say from /services/web-design-portland to /portland-design—and you don't implement a 301 redirect, you are effectively telling Google that the old page died. All the "link equity" or "SEO juice" it built up over five years? Gone. Poof.
Why Load Speed is the New Design
In 2026, Core Web Vitals aren't just a suggestion; they are the barrier to entry. Google’s "CrUX" data (Chrome User Experience Report) tracks how real people experience your site. If your new design uses massive, unoptimized high-res videos that take four seconds to initialize, Google Discover will ignore you. It wants "snappy."
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): This should be under 2.5 seconds.
- CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): This is the annoying thing where a button moves right as you’re about to click it. Keep it under 0.1.
- INP (Interaction to Next Paint): This replaced FID (First Input Delay). It measures how quickly the site reacts when someone clicks something. If your new Javascript-heavy framework is "janky," your UX score will plummet.
Designing for the "Discover" Feed
Google Discover is different from search. In search, people are looking for answers. In Discover, Google is pushing content to people based on their interests. To get there, your redesign needs to prioritize high-quality imagery.
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I’m talking about large, high-resolution images that are at least 1200 pixels wide. But—and this is a big but—they need to be served in WebP or AVIF formats to keep the file size down. If your redesign relies on boring stock photos of "people shaking hands," you won’t get the CTR (Click-Through Rate) needed to stay in the feed. Discover thrives on "entity-based" content. If you're redesigning a tech blog, your images should feature the actual hardware or specific, unique diagrams, not generic illustrations.
The Mobile-First Trap
Everyone says "mobile-first," but then they design on a 27-inch iMac. It's a habit that's hard to break. When you redesign a website, you should be looking at the mobile mockup 90% of the time. If your navigation menu is a "hamburger" that hides all your important internal links, you're making it harder for Google to crawl your site.
Content Pruning: The Marie Kondo Method
Do not move your trash to your new house.
A redesign is the perfect time to look at your "zombie pages." These are pages that have had zero visits in the last six months. They dilute your site's authority.
- Delete: If the content is irrelevant or outdated (like a 2018 event announcement).
- Consolidate: If you have four short articles about "Small Business Tax Tips," merge them into one powerhouse guide.
- Update: If a page is ranking on page two of Google, give it a refresh. New stats, better formatting, maybe a video.
John Mueller from Google has mentioned multiple times that simply having fewer, higher-quality pages is often better than having thousands of mediocre ones. It’s about "search demand." If no one is searching for it, and it provides no value to a user, why is it on your server?
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The Technical Checklist (Don't Skip This)
If you change your site's architecture, you change its DNA.
I once worked with a client who decided to switch their entire site from a subfolder structure (site.com/blog) to a subdomain (blog.site.com) during a redesign. It took them eight months to recover their traffic. Google often treats subdomains as entirely different entities. Unless you have a massive technical reason to do it, keep your structure simple.
Keep your H1 tags unique. Make sure your meta descriptions didn't get overwritten by some "lorem ipsum" placeholder text during the staging process. It sounds basic, but you’d be surprised how many "expert" agencies launch sites with "Home - My New Website" as the title tag for the front page.
The Staging Site Protocol
Never, ever develop on your live site. You need a staging environment that is a "no-index" zone. You don't want Google to find your unfinished, broken redesign and index it before it's ready. Use a simple disallow: / in your robots.txt on the staging server, or better yet, password protect it.
E-E-A-T and The Trust Factor
Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines put a massive emphasis on Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Your redesign should visually signal this.
- Author Bios: Don't just list "Admin." Use real names, photos, and links to social profiles or LinkedIn.
- Contact Info: A real physical address and a working phone number in the footer go a long way in proving you’re a real business and not a fly-by-night affiliate site.
- Citations: If you’re making claims, link to the source. Use schema markup (specifically
Person,Organization, andArticleschema) to help Google's bots understand who is behind the content.
What Most People Get Wrong About UX
"User Experience" isn't just about things looking clean. It's about reducing friction. If a user has to click four times to find your pricing page, they’re going to leave.
I’m a big fan of the "three-click rule." It’s not a law, but it’s a good guideline: a user should be able to find any piece of information on your site within three clicks. This also helps Google's "crawl budget." If your most important pages are buried deep in the architecture, the Googlebot might not even reach them.
Launch Day is Only the Beginning
When you finally flip the switch, the work isn't done. You need to be living in Google Search Console for the next 72 hours. Check the "Indexing" report. Look for 404 errors. If you see a spike in 404s, it means you missed a redirect. Fix it immediately.
Also, monitor your "Time on Page." If it drops significantly with the new design, your users are telling you they hate the new layout. Maybe the font is too small. Maybe the "dark mode" you thought was cool is actually unreadable. Listen to the data.
Actionable Next Steps for Your Redesign
- Export your current URL list: Use a tool to map out every current page so you can plan your 301 redirects before the new site goes live.
- Benchmark your speed: Run your current site through PageSpeed Insights and Save the results. You need a baseline to prove the new site is actually faster.
- Identify "High-Value" Pages: Use Google Analytics to find the top 10% of pages that drive 90% of your traffic. These pages should be the "sacred cows" of your redesign—change them the least.
- Check your Schema: Ensure your structured data is correctly implemented on the new templates. Use the Schema Markup Validator to catch errors before they affect your Rich Snippets.
- Set up a 404 Monitor: Use a plugin or server-side tool to alert you the moment a user hits a dead link so you can redirect it in real-time.
Redesigning a website is a bit like open-heart surgery for your business. It’s risky, it’s complicated, but if done right, it gives you a whole new lease on life. Just don't forget to keep the heart—your content and your data—beating throughout the process.