Headless CMS: which one to choose when you are not a technical team
4 min read
Key takeaways
- A redesign without a redirect plan destroys 40 to 70% of organic traffic on average.
- Map what exists before drawing anything: URLs, rankings, pages that convert.
- One 301 redirect per old URL, to the equivalent page — never in bulk to the home page.
- Plan eight weeks of monitoring after go-live: that is where mistakes get caught up.
- Traffic often drops two to four weeks after a redesign, even a well-done one: do not panic, measure.
We regularly take over sites that someone else redesigned six months earlier. The design is better, the site is faster, and organic traffic has been cut in half. Management does not understand; neither does the agency.
The cause is almost always the same: the redesign was treated as a design project when it is a migration project. Here is the five-phase checklist we apply systematically.
Phase 1 — Map before you draw
Before the first mock-up, produce three lists.
- All existing URLs, including those you have forgotten: old campaign pages, PDFs, indexed images, pagination pages. A full site crawl plus a Search Console export.
- The pages that bring in traffic, with their average position and their entry keywords. Generally, 20% of pages account for 80% of traffic.
- The pages that convert, which are almost never the same as the previous ones.
The test that saves redesigns: if you cannot name the ten pages that bring your site the most organic traffic, you are not ready to redo it. This list conditions the whole architecture of the new site.
Phase 2 — Keep what works
This is the phase where egos clash. The page that brings in the most traffic is often an ugly old page that everyone wants to delete.
Three rules:
- Never delete a page that ranks, except through an owned and documented business decision. Redesign it, do not erase it.
- Keep the URLs where possible. The best migration is one where nothing moves on the address side.
- Keep the real text content. A new design that cuts a page's text volume by three also cuts its chances of ranking by three. The design must adapt to the content, not the other way round.
Phase 3 — The redirect plan
This is the heart of the matter, and the most important document of the redesign.
| Case | Treatment | Common mistake |
|---|---|---|
| The URL does not change | Nothing to do | Changing the URL "to tidy up" |
| The URL changes, the content stays | 301 redirect to the new URL | 302 redirect, which is temporary and does not pass the signal |
| The page is merged with another | 301 to the page that absorbs the content | Redirect to the home page |
| The page is deleted with no equivalent | 301 to the parent category page | Leaving a 404 untreated |
| The URL contains parameters | Redirect keeping the useful parameters | Losing campaign tracking parameters |
The redirect plan is a simple two-column table: old URL, new URL. It must cover 100% of the URLs from phase 1. A single forgotten line on a high-traffic page costs more than the rest of the redesign.
Phase 4 — Check before go-live
On the pre-production environment, check:
- Indexability: no leftover
noindex, no forgottenDisallow: /in the stagingrobots.txt. This is the most frequent and most devastating mistake. titletags and meta descriptions: unique, present on every page, no default template value.- Canonical URLs: each page points to itself, over HTTPS, with or without
wwwdepending on your choice — and the same choice everywhere. - Structured data: kept and valid, notably
Organization,BreadcrumbListand the industry-specific schemas. - Internal linking: strategic pages remain reachable within three clicks at most from the home page.
- Performance: we detail the thresholds that matter in our article on Core Web Vitals.
- The sitemap: regenerated, up to date, with no URL that returns a 404 or a redirect.
Phase 5 — The eight weeks that follow
Going live is not the end of the project, it is the start of monitoring.
Day 1: submit the new sitemap in Search Console, request indexing of the ten strategic pages, check that the production robots.txt is the one intended.
Week 1: check the coverage report daily. Deal with each crawl error within 24 hours.
Weeks 2 to 4: compare rankings page by page, not just overall traffic. A drop in traffic spread evenly is normal; a page that goes from position 3 to position 28 is a signal to deal with immediately.
Weeks 5 to 8: traffic should return to its initial level, then exceed it if the redesign improved speed and structure.
A successful redesign is not judged on go-live day by the beauty of the mock-ups. It is judged eight weeks later on a traffic curve.
The most expensive mistake
It fits in one sentence: launching the redesign before having the redirect plan.
The redirect plan is not a technical task for the end of the project. It is a scoping document that influences the structure of the new site, and therefore the mock-ups, and therefore the development. Producing it last means discovering, three days before go-live, that 400 URLs have no equivalent.
If you are preparing a redesign, send us the URL of your current site: we will send you back, free of charge, the list of your most exposed pages and the points to watch specific to your structure.
Sources
- Migrations de sites (in French) — Google Search Central
- Redirections et recherche Google (in French) — Google Search Central
- Qu'est-ce qu'un sitemap ? (in French) — Google Search Central
- Présentation du fichier robots.txt et guide (in French) — Google Search Central
