Relaunching your website without losing visibility

Every page of a website has its own address. On a ten-year-old trade website it is often still /services.html, /contact-form.html or /news/2019/emergency. Those addresses do not only appear in your own navigation. They appear in search results, in directory entries, in emails to customers, in quotations, in the office signature and sometimes in a newspaper article about the business. A new website almost always organises the content differently: /services.html becomes five service pages, one per trade, and /contact-form.html becomes /contact/. That is the right move. It only goes wrong when the old addresses disappear without replacement.

On switch-over day nobody notices. Anyone opening the home page sees the new website and everything looks fine. The loss begins quietly: everyone arriving through an old search result or a bookmark lands on an error page and is usually gone immediately. After two to three weeks the old addresses drop out of the search results while the new ones are not yet listed. After four to six weeks the office notices that fewer enquiries arrive and puts it down to the weather, the season or the economy.

The connection is hard to see because weeks lie between cause and effect and because the new website objectively looks better than the old one. Avoiding this mistake does not cost a large additional sum, it costs half a day of preparation and an orderly list. What else a relaunch in the trades involves is set out on our services page.

Before anyone talks about colours, images or draft text, the existing site is inventoried. For a typical trade website with twenty to forty pages that takes half an afternoon to a full one, and it is the only work that cannot be made up later. Once the old site is switched off, its addresses can only be reconstructed from other people's lists, and those have gaps.

What is recorded is not the content but the connection to the outside world: which addresses exist, which of them produce enquiries, who points to them from outside and which files are delivered alongside. All of it goes into a single table that accompanies the rebuild and serves as a checklist after the switch.

This inventory is not thrown away after the relaunch. It belongs in the project file, because a year later it still answers why a particular address points to a particular destination. It also means the next rebuild can start within an hour instead of from scratch.

Not every page is worth the same. In most trade businesses three to five pages carry the bulk of the enquiries: the home page, the contact page, one particular service page and, where there is an on-call service, the emergency page. The rest of the website supports those pages but does not replace them. Precisely those pages must not lose their address by accident during a relaunch.

You can get there without measuring anything. The office usually knows what callers refer to, which service is ticked most often in the form and by which route enquiries arrive. Where the hosting includes its own access statistics, that assumption can be compared against the visit figures of the last twelve months. No additional service is needed for this, and the less external analysis is embedded, the simpler the privacy policy stays.

The second benefit of that list shows during the build of the new site: whatever brings enquiries today belongs in the first menu level in future too, not in a submenu because the new structure seems more logical. The page structure that has proven itself for trade businesses follows from exactly this question, not from a template.

A redirect is an instruction from the server: whoever opens this address is sent to that one. For a relaunch the permanent variant is used, technically status 301. It tells the visitor nothing but tells the search engine a great deal, namely that the address has moved for good and that its existing value should pass to the new destination. It is set up in the server configuration or in the content system, depending on what runs the new site.

The one rule about content is this: every destination has to match what the visitor was looking for. Somebody who opened /bathrooms.php wants to read about bathroom refurbishment, not start again on a home page. If the service still exists, the redirect leads to the new service page. If it no longer exists, it leads to the next level up, the service overview, so the visitor at least lands in the right area.

Two technical points come on top. First, redirects should not run in chains, meaning old to interim to new, but point straight at the final destination. Second, redirects stay in place permanently and are not tidied away after a few months, because links from outside often remain unchanged for years. The effort is small, whereas the damage caused by deleting them cannot be corrected afterwards.

Even after a carefully prepared relaunch the visibility moves. Search engines first have to pick up the new addresses, evaluate the redirects and reassign their rating. Experience suggests this phase takes some weeks and runs unevenly, with better and worse days. A fixed duration cannot be promised, and anyone promising one does not know the process.

Four things are observed: addresses that return an error page; the redirects from the table; the search results for the most important terms of the business; and simply the number of enquiries compared with previous months. The fourth figure is the only one that counts, but it reacts most slowly, which is why the other three are needed as an early warning.

What matters is telling fluctuation apart from a finding. A single weak day is normal. If a specific page that used to appear in search results drops out permanently, its redirect is checked first, then its new address, then its content. In that order, because the most common cause is a wrong or missing redirect. How visibility is built up methodically afterwards is covered on our services page.

With us a new website for a trade business starts at a fixed price of 1,490 euro net, a relaunch of an existing website at 2,900 euro net. The difference is not in the design but in the preparation: inventory, address list, redirect plan, migration of existing content and the checks after the switch are part of the scope of a relaunch. The full breakdown is on our services page.

After that only the items that are actually needed run on. Hosting in Germany starts at 15 euro per month, cancellable monthly, no minimum term. Website care with updates, backups and small changes starts at 49 euro per month, cancellable monthly, no minimum term. Which of those a business actually needs can be settled in a short conversation before the rebuild starts, through our contact form.

Anyone who wants to work on being found after the relaunch can commission that separately: local visibility from 290 euro per month, cancellable monthly, no minimum term, or search engine care from 490 euro per month, cancellable monthly, no minimum term. It is not a requirement: a relaunch with complete redirects and updated directory entries usually holds the existing visibility even without ongoing care.