How do you protect lead flow during a website redesign?
Keep the rankings, the redirects, and the forms working while the new site goes live.
Protect lead flow in a redesign by inventorying every current URL before you touch anything, mapping a redirect for each one, keeping the copy on pages that already earn traffic, and retesting every form end to end after cutover. A redesign that loses your rankings is the most expensive mistake in web work, and it is entirely preventable.
Before the build starts
- Export every URL on the current site from the sitemap and a crawl, then join it to traffic and conversions from analytics and Search Console. You now know which pages matter.
- Flag the top pages by organic entries and by form submissions. These are your protected set.
- Save the copy on protected pages. If a page ranks, the words on it are part of why. Rewriting them for tone is how rankings vanish.
- Write down every place a form currently sends data: CRM, email addresses, notification rules, integrations.
The redirect map
Every old URL needs a 301 to the closest matching new URL. Closest matching, not the homepage. Redirecting everything to the homepage tells search engines the old page is gone and the equity mostly evaporates. If a page has no new equivalent, redirect it to the most relevant section page.
Do not forget blog posts, PDFs, old landing pages, and any URL that appears in a running ad campaign or an email. Ads pointing at a dead URL will keep spending until someone notices.
Launch day and the two weeks after
The morning of cutover, work the list: confirm SSL is live on the new site, crawl the new site for broken links and redirect chains, submit the new sitemap, and verify analytics and the conversion events fire. Then submit a real form on every page and confirm the record lands in the CRM with the right owner and the right notification. Test on a phone too.
For the next two weeks, watch Search Console for a jump in 404s and coverage errors, watch analytics for pages that lost their traffic, and watch the CRM for a drop in daily lead count. A lead drop that shows up on day one is almost always a form routing problem, not an SEO problem. Check the plumbing first.
Related: Can you redesign our existing website instead of starting from scratch?, What happens to our old content when we move?, Is SEO built into your custom web development?, and our blog post on building a free broken link checker.