· Nolwen Brosson · Blog  · 6 min read

Showcase Website Redesign: Checklist to Avoid Destroying Your SEO

Changing your website without losing your rankings is possible… but you have to follow a few rules. A poorly prepared showcase website redesign can wipe out years of SEO in just a few days.

1. Understand What’s Already Working

The biggest mistake in a redesign is thinking “new design” before thinking about “existing SEO”.

1.1. Take Inventory of the Pages That Generate Traffic

Before touching anything:

  • Analyse:
    • Google Analytics / Matomo: pages with the most visits from organic traffic.
    • Google Search Console: pages that generate impressions and clicks.
  • Identify:
    • Pages that rank on strategic keywords.
    • Articles/pages that have external backlinks.
    • Pages that convert (contact form, lead capture, quote requests, etc.).

🎯 Goal: know which pages must not be “broken” (deleted, URL drastically changed without redirection, careless merging, etc.).

1.2. Crawl the Current Website

Use a crawler (Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, etc.) to extract:

  • All existing URLs.
  • Title tags, Meta Descriptions, H1/H2.
  • Internal linking (link structure).
  • HTTP codes (200, 301, 404…).

🎯 Goal: have a complete snapshot of the current state to prepare the redesign.

2. Technical SEO Checklist for a Showcase Website Redesign

2.1. 301 Redirects: Your Shield Against Traffic Loss

As soon as a URL changes, you must set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one.

Best practices:

  • One redirect per URL, not “everything to the homepage”.
  • Redirect to the most relevant page, not just something “kind of similar”.
  • Avoid redirect chains (A → B → C): favour A → C.

Never do this:

  • Let important pages end up as 404s.
  • Redirect the entire website to the homepage under the pretext of “simplifying”.

👉 Without a solid 301 redirect plan, you lose the SEO history associated with your old URLs.

2.2. URL Structure: Clear, Logical, and Stable

A redesign is often a good time to “clean up” your URLs… but do it smartly.

👍🏻 A few best practices:

  • Short, readable URLs, without obscure parameters.
  • Hierarchical structure:
    • /services/showcase-website-creation
    • /services/ecommerce-website
    • /blog/showcase-website-redesign-seo
  • Keywords integrated naturally, without over-optimisation:
    • ✅ /showcase-website-redesign-seo
    • ❌ /showcase-website-redesign-seo-cheap-cheap-cheap

👎🏻 To avoid:

  • Changing all URLs “to make things cleaner” without an SEO plan.
  • Adding dates in URLs if not necessary (/2023/05/article-…) → makes future updates more complicated.
  • Switching from a stable structure to a completely different one without preparing redirects.

2.3. H1, H2 and Content Structure

A visual redesign often comes with a new system of blocks/components. That’s where heading structures often get broken.

Points to watch:

  • Only 1 H1 per page, describing the main topic.
  • H2s for main sections, H3s for subsections.
  • Keep the main keywords in:
    • The H1
    • At least one H2
    • The first 100 words of the content.

Common mistakes:

  • Putting the site logo in an H1 tag (very common in themes/templates).
  • Having multiple H1s on the page (one per “hero” block, slider, etc.).
  • Replacing well-structured text pages with pages that are almost entirely visual (images, animations, very little text).

2.4. Loading Time & Core Web Vitals

Google doesn’t just look at content: it also measures user experience, notably via Core Web Vitals:

  • LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): time to display the main element.
  • CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): layout stability (avoiding elements “jumping” around).
  • INP (Interaction to Next Paint): overall responsiveness (replaces FID).

In practice, for a showcase website:

  • Optimise images:
    • Modern formats (WebP/AVIF if possible).
    • Appropriate compression.
    • Dimensions adapted to the design (don’t display a 4000px image at 400px).
  • Enable server-side caching (HTTP cache, CDN).
  • Limit:
    • Third-party scripts (pixels, unnecessary trackers, heavy widgets).
    • Heavy JavaScript animations.
  • Load resources smartly:
    • Lazy load off-screen images.
    • Defer non-critical scripts.

👉 A redesign is the perfect time to gain performance points rather than lose them.

This tool makes it easy to analyse your site’s performance: https://pagespeed.web.dev/

3. Classic Mistakes That Destroy SEO During a Redesign

Here are the traps we see very frequently.

3.2. Deleting Pages That Ranked “Because the Content Is No Longer Up to Date”

Two common cases:

  • An old blog article that still ranks very well → deleted instead of being updated.
  • A service page deemed “less strategic” by marketing → deleted instead of being redirected to a related service.

Alternative:

  • Update/rewrite the content.
  • Smartly merge two similar pages → but redirect the old URL to the new one.

3.3. Launching the New Site Without SEO Testing

Recurring errors:

  • Forgetting to disable the global “noindex” that was enabled on the pre-production environment.
  • Forgetting to update sitemap.xml.
  • Leaving a robots.txt that’s too restrictive.
  • Not checking 404s after going live.

➡️ A redesign should be prepared like a product launch: you test, you check, you fix.

3.4. Reducing Text Content “to Look Cleaner”

The “ultra minimal” trend can be dangerous:

  • Pages with very little text.
  • Removal of explanatory sections that contained important keywords.
  • Everything becomes sliders/icons with no real substance.

➡️ You can absolutely have a clean, minimalist design without cutting content down to almost nothing: it’s just a matter of presenting it differently.

4. How Fenxi Handles a Showcase Website Redesign Without Breaking SEO

At Fenxi, we support redesigns of showcase websites, e-commerce sites, and web apps with an SEO-by-design approach: SEO is integrated from the start, not patched on at the end.

4.1. SEO Audit & Initial Diagnosis

Before the first design screen, we carry out:

  • An SEO audit:
    • Full crawl of the current website.
    • Analysis of top-performing pages.
    • Analysis of technical issues (404s, redirects, missing tags, etc.).
  • An Analytics + Search Console analysis:
    • Organic traffic.
    • Pages that convert.
    • Queries the site is already ranking on.

🎯 Goal: clearly identify what must be protected at all costs.

4.2. Architecture & Content Designed for SEO

During the design phase:

  • We define a new site structure while keeping SEO logic in mind:
    • Smart grouping of content.
    • Creation or maintenance of “pillar” pages for key topics.
  • We work on page templates:
    • Consistent H1/H2 structure.
    • Text areas that are sufficiently rich.
    • Blocks dedicated to FAQs / social proof / case studies, etc.
  • We provide keyword recommendations by page type to guide content writing.

The goal is not to “stuff” keywords everywhere, but to ensure each page clearly talks about its topic, both for the user and for Google.

4.3. Precise 301 Redirect Plan

Once the new structure and new URLs are defined, we:

  1. Export all old URLs (via crawl and logs if needed).
  2. Map each old URL to:
    • The equivalent new URL, or
    • The closest page in terms of intent.
  3. Produce a 301 redirect file:
    • Optimised to avoid chains.
    • Tested on the pre-production environment.

✅ We test the redirect plan before launch to make sure no important URL “falls into the void”.

Conclusion

If you’re considering a showcase website redesign and want to change your site without losing your SEO, we can support you with:

  • SEO and technical audit before the redesign.
  • Designing a new SEO-friendly site architecture.
  • Implementing the 301 redirect plan.
  • Post-launch monitoring and continuous optimisation.
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