Benchmark before you change anything
Export your top pages by traffic and conversions, your most linked pages and your current rankings. This becomes the checklist you'll use to make sure nothing important is lost.
Map every important URL
Create a spreadsheet mapping each old URL to its new equivalent. Where pages are merged or removed, redirect to the most relevant new page, not the home page.
Keep what search engines rely on
- Titles, meta descriptions and headings on key pages
- Internal links to important pages
- Structured data and canonical tags
- Image alt text and file names
Launch carefully and monitor
Launch in a quiet period, submit the new sitemap in Search Console, crawl the site for broken links and watch traffic and indexing closely for several weeks.
