Redesign a Website Without Losing SEO: Store Migration Checklist

Key takeaways

• Keep 301 redirects for at least a year: Google says “generally at least 1 year”, Yandex at least 6 months.
• Send each old URL to its closest new page in as few hops as possible. Mass redirects to the home page may count as soft 404s in Google and slow down indexing in Yandex.
• Change one thing at a time, the domain first and the design later. Google: “Plan your changes to your site one after the other, not everything at the same time.”
• Tilda’s code export is for Business plans only, leaves the product catalog behind and disables direct product links, so rebuild product pages from the catalog CSV.
• Watch mapped pages for at least eight weeks: Google expects “a few weeks or more” for a medium-sized site, and a Yandex address change takes several weeks.

A redesign loses search traffic when old URLs stop answering, page copy disappears or a noindex tag (it keeps a page out of search) ships from the test site. To redesign a website without losing SEO, send every old URL to its closest new page with a 301 (permanent) redirect and keep it: Google says "generally at least 1 year", Yandex at least 6 months.

This checklist is for stores and lead-generation sites with search traffic that plan a new design, platform or both. It puts Google's and Yandex's rules side by side and covers store specifics: product URLs, variants, sold-out items, Tilda and Shopify limits. If you are still choosing a platform, start with our Shopify vs custom vs Tilda comparison.

What each change puts at risk. Sources: Google Search Central (updated August 2026), Yandex Webmaster Help (October 2026).

What actually loses traffic in a redesign?

Traffic drops after a redesign come from mechanical mistakes that a design review rarely catches. Google's list of common migration mistakes opens with two: a noindex tag or robots.txt block (the file that tells crawlers what not to fetch) left over from the test site, and redirects to "the wrong (non-existent) URLs on the new site."

What we check next:

• Unmapped URLs. An old address with no redirect returns a 404 (not found), and links from other sites lead to an error page.
• Redirects to the home page. Many old URLs sent to one irrelevant page "might be treated as a soft 404 error" by Google, that is, as missing pages.
• Lost copy. New templates drop the category text, FAQ blocks, headings and internal links the page ranked with. The URL survives; the content doesn't.
• Weak redirects. Google's redirect guide says temporary 302 and 307 redirects show the source page in results, and a JavaScript redirect may go unseen "if rendering of the content failed."
• Slower pages. Google's Core Web Vitals guide recommends good scores "for success with Search": main content (LCP) loaded within 2.5 seconds, a response to taps (INP) in under 200 milliseconds and layout shift (CLS) under 0.1.

Some movement is normal: "Expect temporary fluctuation in site ranking during the move," Google's guide says.

How to benchmark and inventory URLs before a redesign

Record what ranks before anyone opens a design file. The snapshot feeds the redirect map and becomes your baseline after launch.

Google suggests collecting old URLs from:

• XML sitemaps;
• server logs and analytics covering seasonal peaks;
• the Links report in Search Console;
• your CMS (content management system) or store admin;
• embedded images, video, JavaScript and CSS files, which "need to be moved in the same way as all other content on your website."

Add a crawl with a tool such as Screaming Frog to catch pages no report lists. For every URL, save the title, H1 (main heading), meta description, canonical URL (the address a page names as its main version), status code, and clicks and impressions from Search Console and Yandex Webmaster.

In Yandex Webmaster, put the most valuable pages into Important page monitoring: it takes "up to 100 URLs per site" and notifies you when their status changes. Then mark every URL keep, merge or drop. Drop means a deliberate 404 or 410 (gone), decided now rather than discovered after launch.

An inventory also shows what the old site got wrong. Search engines barely saw the old site of Encore, a Dubai marketing, PR and events agency: 8 pages, no meta descriptions and 38 H1 tags on the homepage. The rebuild has 34 pages with one H1 and a meta description each, plus Schema markup (structured data for search engines), Open Graph previews and an llms.txt file for AI assistants, covered in our guide to generative engine optimization.

How to build the redirect map: one-to-one 301s, short chains, kept a year

A redirect map is a spreadsheet that pairs each old URL with its new address and status code. Build it before launch and keep the redirects live for at least a year:

"Keep the redirects for as long as possible, generally at least 1 year. This timeframe allows Google to transfer all signals to the new URLs, including recrawling and reassigning links on other sites that point to your old URLs." — Google Search Central, Move a site with URL changes

Yandex's HTTP status code reference sets a lower floor: "Keep the redirect active for at least 6 months to ensure correct processing by search engines."

1. One to one. Each old URL goes to its closest new page. Several may share a target only when that page merges their content.
2. Permanent codes. Use 301 or 308: Google takes them as a signal that the target "should be canonical", and temporary 302 and 307 redirects aren't.
3. Short chains. Googlebot follows up to 10 hops, but Google advises "redirecting to the final destination directly" and, if that isn't possible, chains of "ideally no more than 3 and fewer than 5". Yandex is the exception: when both the domain name and the directory names change, it asks for a double redirect, old domain to the same path on the new one, then to the new path.
4. Server-side first. Google orders redirect methods "by how likely Google is able to interpret correctly": server-side, then meta refresh, with JavaScript as a last resort.

Update internal links, canonicals, hreflang tags (links between language versions) and the XML sitemap at the same time, and fill a "tested" column in the map from a crawl. Template-built sites, such as the restaurant guide in our programmatic SEO case study, need pattern rules rather than thousands of rows: Google suggests rewriting rules "for common redirect patterns".

Store migration: product, category and image URLs, variants, sold-out items

A store multiplies every rule by the catalog. Map products by SKU (stock keeping unit, the product's internal code), not by name: names change in a redesign, codes rarely do.

• Products. Join the old and new product exports on SKU, generate the redirect rows, then check the bestsellers by hand.
• Categories. Send each to its closest new category; when one splits, to the part that holds most of its products.
• Filters. Filtered addresses such as ?color=black rarely need a place in search, so point their canonical at the category. Shopify warns that redirects with query strings "might not work as expected", and it can't redirect collection tag filter URLs.
• Variants. Keep variant URLs working. For variant markup, Google's product variant guidelines say the site must be able to "preselect each variant directly with a distinct URL (using URL query parameters)".
• Sold-out and discontinued items. Out of stock for now: keep the page, marked out of stock. Discontinued: redirect to the successor or the category, as in Shopify's example of a deleted /products/blue-t-shirt sent to /collections/t-shirts. Nothing close: 404 or 410.
• Images. A new platform or CDN (content delivery network) changes every image URL; map the images that bring visits from image search.
• Structured data. Carry Product markup (price, availability, reviews) into the new templates and test them in Google's Rich Results Test.

Should you rebuild in place or change the platform?

Rebuild in place when the platform still does what the business needs; change it when it can't. Either way, follow Google: "Plan your changes to your site one after the other, not everything at the same time."

Barber & Co, a Minsk professional cosmetics store, stayed on its platform: we rebuilt its Tilda store in place. The catalog's 115 sections sat in one flat list, 104 of them hidden, and became a tree: hair, face, body, beard and shaving. Of 22 filter groups, 18 were categories in disguise, so filters came down to 5, and a catalog kept on nine hand-edited page copies became one.

The build took 3 weeks on the live store, from catalog to cart, and one import laid out 795 product pages in tabs. Catalog images got 30 times lighter: 26 MB of originals against 0.8 MB live.

Case study · Barber & CoA faster, mobile-first store for a barber brand30×lighter catalog images

In-place work leaves the platform alone, so the risk sits in templates, copy and merged pages. Change the platform when the store must share stock, bookings or customer data with systems the current one can't connect to, and keep the design familiar during that move so any ranking change traces to URLs.

Leaving Tilda: what the export carries and what it doesn't

Tilda's code export moves static pages; the store stays behind. Code export is "only available for Tilda Business Plan subscribers", and Tilda CRM, Tilda Members and the product catalog can't be exported.

• Page addresses. The export's htaccess file works on Apache; on Caddy or Nginx "you will have to create mappings manually", so check every page URL before switching the domain.
• Products. On an exported site "direct links will be disabled": products open only from the product list and are unpublished 7 days after the subscription ends. Rebuild product pages on the new platform.
• Catalog data. Tilda's catalog export gives CSV or YML. The CSV has SKU, SEO title, SEO description and product page link columns, so one file feeds the new catalog and the redirect map.
• Editing and HTTPS. Tilda forbids changing exported code outside Tilda, and the free SSL certificate is disabled, so install your own.

Inside Tilda, 301 redirects "work only from non-existent pages" and only within the same domain; to redirect from a live page, Tilda points to block T223. For a new domain, Tilda's redirect help says its workarounds don't give "a full-fledged 301 redirection": you move the domain to a third-party server and create the redirects there.

On Shopify, products live under /products/ and collections under /collections/, so addresses from another platform usually change. Shopify's redirect rules allow redirects only from broken URLs: "If the URL still loads a valid webpage, then the URL redirect won't work." A store holds up to 100,000 redirects, or 20,000,000 on Plus, and imports them as CSV.

RYTM, a Bali chronobiology brand, took the platform route: rytm.shop went live off Tilda 8 weeks after the first commit, with the same look for shoppers. Its catalog lives in its own database, and the sitemap lists 44 store pages, 11 in each of four languages, linked with hreflang.

Case study · RYTMBrand, site, store and back office for a wellness brand4languages across the store and booking

Launch-day migration checklist: noindex, canonicals, sitemaps, analytics

Launch day is a sequence: switch, verify, then tell the search engines. Within one move, Google recommends that small and medium sites move "all URLs on your site simultaneously instead of moving one section at a time."

1. Quiet window. "Time your move to coincide with lower traffic, if possible."
2. Server capacity. After a migration, Google "will crawl your new site more heavily than usual."
3. Staging blocks off. Remove the test site's noindex tags and robots.txt rules.
4. Canonicals. Each new page names itself, never the old domain or the staging host.
5. Redirects on, then crawl. Every mapped old URL should reach a 200 (OK) page in one hop, or two with Yandex's double redirect. Announce nothing until the crawl passes.
6. Sitemaps. Submit the new sitemap in Search Console and Yandex Webmaster. Google also suggests submitting the old one and watching its indexed count fall to zero.
7. Domain change only. Submit a Change of Address in Google and use Indexing → Relocate site in Yandex Webmaster, which wants both sites verified, matching robots.txt files and a server response in under 10 seconds.
8. Analytics and verification. Check tags on every template; Google warns that "verification tokens may be different when the URL changes."
9. Your own links. Update profiles, ads and email templates, since "redirects are slow for users."

Google vs Yandex: what to expect after launch

Both engines want permanent redirects to matching pages, and neither promises stable rankings during a move.

Site move rules. Sources: Google Search Central (updated August 2026), Yandex Webmaster Help (October 2026).

"When you change the primary address, Yandex doesn't guarantee that the number of site pages in search results, the page ranking, or traffic will remain the same." — Yandex Webmaster Help, Moving a site to a new domain name

In Yandex the switch comes in steps: old pages are "excluded from search results after several updates of the search databases."

Monitoring and rollback triggers for the first eight weeks

For eight weeks, compare mapped pages with their benchmark and fix what breaks; only a broken checkout or an outage justifies switching back.

Day 0–1

• Re-crawl the old URL list and the new sitemap.
• Place a test order from product page to payment.
• Read server logs for 404 and 5xx (server error) spikes.
• On a domain move, real-time analytics should show traffic "drop on the old site and rise on the new site," Google says.

Week 1

• Check Search Console for an unusually high number of "Not found" errors, Google's sign of wrong redirects.
• Read Yandex Webmaster notifications for monitored pages.
• Request recrawls of key pages in both engines.

Weeks 2–8

• Compare clicks per top page with the benchmark, not sitewide totals.
• Check Core Web Vitals field data for the new templates.
• Ask owners of your most valuable backlinks to update them.

Rollback triggers and our usual responses.

When the mapped pages are back at their benchmark, start the next change on your list. If you'd rather hand the move to a team, URL mapping, redirects and post-launch checks are part of our website design and development work.

Questions we get asked

Will a new design hurt my rankings if the URLs stay the same?

It can. Rankings follow the content, not only the address: if the new templates drop category text, FAQ blocks, headings or internal links, the page loses what it ranked with, and heavier templates can push Core Web Vitals past Google’s thresholds. Before launch, compare each top page’s title, H1, copy and links with the old version and test speed on the new templates.

How long does it take to recover rankings after a site migration?

Google says that for medium-sized sites it can “take a few weeks or more” before Google gradually starts showing the new URLs instead of the old ones, and even longer for larger sites. In Yandex, the primary address change on a domain move takes several weeks, and old pages drop out over several search database updates. Compare mapped pages with your benchmark for at least eight weeks before you judge the result.

Do I have to keep the same URLs when I redesign?

No, but every URL you change needs a 301 redirect to its closest new page. Keeping addresses is the safest path: there is nothing to redirect. When the structure must change, map each old URL, update internal links, canonicals and the sitemap, and test every row with a crawler before launch. On a domain change, also file Google’s Change of Address and Yandex’s Relocate site.

Can I remove redirects after a year?

You can, but Google’s year is a minimum: “generally at least 1 year”, and Yandex asks for at least 6 months. Google adds: “From users’ perspective, consider keeping redirects indefinitely.” Old links in emails, bookmarks and other sites keep sending people to the old addresses long after the move. Remove rules only when they cost you something, such as a platform cap like Shopify’s 100,000 redirects.

What does an SEO-safe site migration service include?

Usually a URL inventory and benchmark, a redirect map tested with a crawler, template checks for copy, headings, structured data and speed, launch-day checks and eight weeks of monitoring in Search Console and Yandex Webmaster. At NextGenSoft a senior partner leads the migration personally and brings in the developers and SEO specialists it needs. Scope depends on page count, platform, domain and languages.

Sources

1. Move a site with URL changes · Google Search Central, 2026
2. Redirects and Google Search · Google Search Central, 2026
3. Moving a site to a new domain name · Yandex Webmaster Help, 2026
4. HTTP status codes reference · Yandex Webmaster Help, 2026
5. Code export · Tilda Help Center, 2026
6. Guide to SEO: How to promote your website online · Tilda Help Center, 2026
7. How to Create URL Redirects · Tilda Help Center, 2026
8. Creating and managing URL redirects · Shopify Help Center, 2026

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About the author

Artsiom Yankovich

Head of Design & Strategy

Leads design and strategy, from product logic to brand. 9+ years, 150+ projects.

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