The fastest way to torch a year of SEO is a "modernization" project that changes URLs, breaks redirects, and ships a slower site under a new design. The good news: it's avoidable.
Freeze the URL inventory first
Before you touch a layout, crawl the existing site and export every indexed URL. Pull last 90 days of GSC clicks and impressions for each. That spreadsheet is your contract.
Preserve, don't redesign, the metadata
- Title tags — copy verbatim unless the page genuinely changes intent.
- Meta descriptions — same.
- H1 — preserve the primary one.
- Canonical URLs — point to the new URL only if it changed.
- Schema — emit the same @type as before.
Redirects: 1 hop, no chains
Every chain costs you crawl budget and a little equity at each step. Validate your redirect table before launch — no redirect should require two hops to resolve.
Pre-launch acceptance gate
Crawl staging. Diff against production. Zero broken canonicals. Zero 5xxs. Lighthouse SEO ≥ 95 on every template. No redirect chains > 1 hop.
Do all of this and ranking retention sits in the 95–100% range. Skip any of it and you're back rebuilding traffic for six months.
From IT Artificer
Digital Marketing & SEO
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