How do I protect my hotel's rankings during a website redesign?

Before launch

1. Inventory what matters

Export your current URLs from your sitemap, Search Console's performance report (pages with impressions or clicks), analytics landing pages, and any pages with external links. Room, location, offer, and destination pages are typically the most valuable.

2. Map old URLs to new URLs

Create a spreadsheet: old URL → new URL. Each old page should go to its closest equivalent, not all to the homepage. Pages with no equivalent can redirect to the most relevant parent page.

3. Preserve what earns rankings

• Keep or improve the text content of high-performing pages.
• Carry over unique titles, meta descriptions, and headings.
• Re-implement structured data (for example, Hotel markup).
• Keep hreflang relationships for language versions.

4. Protect the staging site — and remember to unprotect it

Block staging from indexing (password protection is safest). Make a launch checklist item to remove any noindex on the live site.

At launch

• Deploy permanent redirects for every mapped URL. Google recommends keeping redirects generally for at least a year.
• Update internal links to point directly to new URLs (not through redirects).
• Update canonicals, the XML sitemap, and your Google Business Profile website link.
• If you're changing domain, use Search Console's Change of Address tool — for every verified variant of the old domain (www, non-www, and subdomains). It isn't needed for HTTPS or www changes on the same domain.

After launch

• Test a sample of old URLs: each should return a single redirect to the right page.
• Watch Search Console's page indexing and performance reports for several weeks.
• Fix 404 errors for previously valuable URLs promptly.

Google notes rankings can fluctuate while it recrawls; for medium-sized sites it can take a few weeks or more before the new URLs replace the old ones, and longer for large sites.

Already launched and lost rankings?

1. Find the pages that lost traffic (compare performance before and after).
2. Check whether their old URLs redirect correctly.
3. Compare old and new content — was important information removed?
4. Check for leftover noindex tags and robots.txt blocks.

Common mistakes

• Redirecting everything to the homepage.
• Launching with the staging noindex still active.
• Dropping detailed room or location text in favour of image-heavy designs.
• Changing URLs, design, and content all at once without a plan.

Checklist

• Complete list of valuable old URLs
• Old-to-new redirect map, page by page
• Content, titles, and structured data carried over
• Permanent redirects live at launch
• No noindex on the live site
• Sitemap and internal links updated
• Search Console monitored for several weeks after launch