You launched the new site. It looks great. Then a customer says the link from their old email gives an error, or your phone goes quiet and you cannot work out why.
Odds are your redesign changed the addresses of your pages and nobody told the internet. This is fixable, and you can do most of it this week.
How do you know a redesign broke your old addresses?
Look for the symptoms. They are not subtle once you know them.
- Searching your business name shows listings that lead to an error page.
- Old blog posts or service pages that used to bring in calls have gone quiet.
- Clicking an old listing drops you on the homepage instead of the page you searched for.
- Links from other sites, directories or old emails land on "page not found."
Try it right now. Search Google for your company name plus a service you offer. Click every result that belongs to you. If any of them fail, or all of them end up on the homepage, keep reading.
Why does a redesign break addresses at all?
A new platform builds new addresses. Unless someone maps the old ones to the new ones, the old ones simply stop working.
Search engines remember. So do bookmarks, review sites and every link anyone ever shared. The old address is still out there, and it now points at nothing.
Step 1: list every address your site ever published
You cannot fix what you have not counted. Build one master list of every address the old site ever answered on.
Pull from every source you can find:
- The old sitemap, if you still have a copy.
- Your analytics, set to a long date range, listing every page that ever got a visit.
- Your hosting or server logs, if your developer can export them.
- Any older platform the site lived on before the current one.
That last one matters more than people expect. When we rebuilt the site for A New Leaf Painting Contractors in Jacksonville, we traced every address the site had published, back through its older platforms. A site that has moved twice has three generations of addresses, and visitors still arrive on all of them.
Put everything in a spreadsheet. One address per row. Do not worry about duplicates yet.
Step 2: find what Google still lists in Search Console
Search Console is free, and it tells you what search engines actually know about your site. Your list from Step 1 is what you think exists. This is what Google thinks exists.
Open the Pages report under Indexing. Look at the reasons pages are not indexed, especially "Not found (404)" and the ones marked as redirects. Click into each and export the addresses.
Then open the Performance report, set the range as wide as it allows, and list the pages that earned clicks. Those are the addresses worth the most care.
Add all of it to your spreadsheet. If an address appears in Google but not in your list from Step 1, you just found a gap. Better now than in three months.
Step 3: decide where each old page should go
Now the real work. Go down the list, one row at a time, and give every old address one of three answers:
- A replacement exists. The new site has a page on the same topic. Send the old address there.
- No replacement, but a close parent. The old page covered something you still offer, but now lives inside a bigger page. Send it to that page, only if the topics truly match.
- No good home. The page was thin, a near-copy of another, or about something you no longer do. It gets a clean "gone" (Step 5).
Be honest on row three. The question is not "where can I send this?" It is "would a person who clicked this find what they wanted?" If not, it does not get a redirect.
Why does sending everything to the homepage backfire?
It feels safe. One rule, every old address lands somewhere, no error pages. It is also one of the most common mistakes we see.
That is what happened to A New Leaf Painting. After their move to a new platform, hundreds of old addresses were redirected to the homepage, while pages that search engines still listed were gone.
Here is why it backfires:
- Visitors feel tricked. Someone clicked a page about exterior painting in a specific town and landed on a generic homepage. They leave.
- Google reads it as a miss. A redirect that does not match the old page's topic is treated like an error, not a handoff. The old page's standing does not carry over.
- You hide the real problem. Your error reports look clean while hundreds of pages quietly lose their value.
A homepage redirect is a shrug. Make a decision instead.
Step 4: set up one-hop redirects
A redirect tells browsers and search engines "this page moved, go here instead." Use a permanent redirect, usually called a 301, for every address that has a replacement.
The rule that matters is one hop. The old address goes straight to the final page. Not old to older to newer to current.
Chains happen naturally when a site moves more than once. Each hop slows the visitor and gives search engines a reason to stop following. When you build your redirect list, point every row at the final destination, even if an earlier redirect already exists for it.
A few practical notes:
- Match the old address exactly, including capital letters, trailing slashes and any odd file endings.
- Send people to the page that replaced the old one, not a category that merely contains it.
- If you cannot do this yourself, hand your spreadsheet to your developer. A clean two-column sheet of "old address" and "new address" is the best gift you can give them.
Step 5: let thin pages answer "gone" instead
Not every old page deserves a second life. Some were near-identical copies, auto-generated pages, or leftovers that never said anything useful.
For those, the honest answer is "this page is gone." Servers can say so with a status called 410, or a standard 404. Either one tells search engines to stop listing it.
At A New Leaf Painting, some pages were thin and near-identical, and should never have been published. We gave those a clean "gone" instead of redirecting them to something unrelated. Everything else answered in a single hop to the page that replaced it.
Why bother? Because forcing a weak page into a redirect pulls a mismatch into your good pages. A clear "gone" is cleaner than a wrong answer. Google drops it, and your real pages stand on their own.
Step 6: check the fix and watch it for a month
Do not trust the spreadsheet. Test the result.
Take a sample of old addresses from each group: replaced, moved to a parent, gone. Type each into a browser. Confirm the replaced ones land on the right page in one step, and the gone ones say so.
Then open Search Console and watch:
- Week one. Submit your new sitemap. Recheck the Pages report for new "Not found" entries you missed.
- Weeks two and three. Look at the Performance report. Pages that used to earn clicks should start showing up at their new addresses.
- Week four. Compare against your list. Anything still failing goes back on the sheet.
Expect Google to take time. It re-crawls on its own schedule, and a month is a reasonable window to see the pattern. Page speed is worth a look at the same time, and our speed test will show you where you stand.
What does a finished migration look like?
For A New Leaf Painting, it meant the site came back with every page at its original address, its own words carried over, and every old address answering correctly. Nothing a customer or a search engine knew went missing. You can read the full story in their case study.
That is the goal for your site too. Not a clever trick. Just a careful list, honest decisions, and a check at the end.
Your next step this week
Open a spreadsheet today. Pull the old sitemap or your analytics history and write down every address you can find. Then log in to Search Console and export the "Not found (404)" list.
Those two lists are the whole project. If the list is longer than you expected, our SEO and analytics team does this for a living, and you can get in touch whenever you want a second pair of eyes.