A new website should lift traffic. Too often it does the opposite for months, and the cause is almost always technical: old URLs that lead nowhere, a staging setting left switched on, or pages search engines can no longer read. Every one of these is avoidable with a checklist.
Before launch: protect what already ranks
- Export every URL that receives traffic or links from Search Console, your analytics and a full crawl of the old site.
- Map each old URL to its closest new equivalent and set up permanent (301) redirects. Avoid sending everything to the homepage; Google may treat that as a soft 404.
- Keep redirects in a single hop. Chains of redirects slow crawling and users alike.
- Carry over page titles, meta descriptions and headings for pages that already perform, then improve them deliberately.
Indexing controls: the settings that cause disasters
- Remove any noindex tags and password protection used on staging, and confirm the production robots.txt does not block the site.
- Remember that robots.txt controls crawling, not indexing. A blocked URL can still appear in results; use a noindex tag on a crawlable page to keep it out. Google does not support noindex rules inside robots.txt.
- Set a self-referencing canonical tag on every indexable page, using the final URL with your chosen trailing slash and protocol.
- Keep staging environments behind authentication so they never get indexed alongside the live site.
Help search engines find and understand pages
- Generate an XML sitemap of indexable, canonical URLs only. A single sitemap may hold up to 50,000 URLs or 50 MB uncompressed; split larger sites into several.
- Submit the sitemap in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
- Make sure important content and links are present in the HTML, not only after scripts run.
- Add structured data that matches the page: Organization on the homepage, BreadcrumbList on inner pages, Article, Product or other types where they apply.
- For multiple languages or regions, add hreflang annotations that reference each other and include an x-default.
Changing domains
If the domain itself changes, keep the old domain registered and redirecting for the long term, verify both properties in Search Console and use its Change of Address tool. Update links you control, such as social profiles, business listings and email signatures.
The first four weeks after launch
- Crawl the live site on day one to catch broken links, redirect errors and missing tags.
- Watch Search Console daily for crawl errors, indexing drops and pages reported as not found.
- Compare traffic for your top landing pages against the same period before launch, and fix any page that falls sharply.
- Check Core Web Vitals in field data once enough visits have accumulated.
