Will a New Website Hurt Your Google Rankings? What to Check Before You Launch

A new website can move your Google rankings for a few weeks, and Google says that's normal. What you can prevent is the loss from old page addresses that lead nowhere, pages that got cut and a "hide from Google" setting left on after testing. You can check all of that before launch.

You've got a quote for a new website, or it's already half built. The current site is ugly, but it brings in calls. So the real question is whether the new one is going to cost you those calls.

A disclosure first: Osprey builds websites, so we have a stake in this. The rules below come straight from Google's own guides, and we link them so you can read them yourself. Where something is our opinion, we say so.

Will a New Website Drop Your Google Rankings?

It might, for a while. Google's site move guide says: “With any significant change to a site, you may experience ranking fluctuations while Google recrawls and reindexes your site.” It also says “a small to medium-sized website can take a few weeks for most pages to move”, and that “a site's rankings will settle down over time”.

Read that last line closely. Settling down isn't the same as landing where you started. The guides we read don't promise that, and neither should anyone selling you a website.

There's good news on one old worry. Google says “301 and other permanent redirects don't cause a loss in PageRank”. A 301 redirect is mail forwarding for a web page: anyone who goes to the old address gets sent to the new one. Set up properly, it doesn't cost you the credit your links have built up.

How Risky Is Your Kind of New Website?

It depends on what's changing. Google treats these as different jobs, and the extra work climbs as you go down the table.

Row three catches people out. A new platform can change your addresses even when nobody planned it. A page at /roof-repair.html on the old site might become /services/roof-repair on the new one. Google's own example of a move that counts is as small as /page.html becoming /page.htm.

The hosting row comes from Google's hosting guide. The last row comes from its Change of Address page.

What Can Go Wrong During the Launch?

Six things, and you can catch each one before it costs you. Most come from Google's guide. Where one is our opinion, we say so.

1. Old pages lead nowhere

Google knows your old addresses, and other sites may link to them. If those addresses are dead on launch day, people land on an error page. Getting the redirects wrong is common too. Google says: “We frequently see people redirecting to the wrong (non-existent) URLs on the new site.”

2. Everything gets pointed at the home page

It's the shortcut, and Google calls it out: “Don't redirect many old URLs to one irrelevant single URL destination, such as the home page of the new site.” It says that “might be treated as a soft 404 error”, which means Google can treat the page as missing even though it loads. If you merged three old pages into one, pointing all three at the merged page is fine. If you dropped a page on purpose, let it return a 404 or 410 error.

3. The "hide from Google" setting stays on

Builders often hide a site while they work on it. Google says “some site owners block all crawling while in development”. That's fine until launch. Two settings do this: a robots.txt file and a noindex tag. In WordPress, the same thing can sit behind one checkbox called “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”.

Google's noindex guide is blunt about the result: Google “will drop that page entirely from Google Search results”. It's first on Google's list of common mistakes.

4. Pages get cut to make the site look clean

This one is our opinion, not a Google rule. Say a designer looks at your 40 old pages and suggests 6 tidy ones. If “roof repair in Vernon” was one of the 34 that disappeared, you've got no page left to rank for that search. A redirect can't fix that, because the content is gone. It's why we don't ship a site under 30 pages, and why service area pages matter so much.

5. Everything changes at once

New domain, new platform and new design in one weekend is what Google says not to do: “Plan your changes to your site one after the other, not everything at the same time.” If something drops, you want to know what caused it. We'd apply the same thinking to wording. Move a page that ranks across with its words and title intact, then improve it later.

6. Tracking breaks and nobody notices

Your Analytics tag, call tracking and form tracking often live in the old site's code. Google's guide covers part of this: keep your Search Console verification working and point your ad campaigns at the new pages. The rest is our addition, because a broken form won't show up in rankings at all. You just get fewer leads and no idea why. Our guide to tracking marketing ROI covers what should be running.

What Should You Do Before the New Site Goes Live?

You can do most of this yourself or hand it to your builder as a list. If your builder can't show you step three, don't launch yet.

1. Save a before picture. In Google Search Console, open Performance, pick the last 3 months and export it. If you don't have Search Console set up, start there.
2. List every old address. Google suggests your sitemaps, your analytics and the links report in Search Console. Your sitemap is often at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. Include images and PDFs, since Google says these “might already be getting traffic”.
3. Build a two-column sheet. Old address on the left, closest new page on the right. A blank on the right means a decision: rebuild it, merge it or let it go.
4. Ask for server-side 301 redirects. Google recommends permanent server-side redirects and calls client-side ones “a last resort”. Send each old address straight to its final page. Google says to keep any chain “ideally no more than 3” hops.
5. Pick a quiet week. Google says to time a move for lower traffic if you can. For most trades, that means not the week before your busy season. Here's our slow season plan.
6. Keep a copy of the old site. Back it up, and don't cancel the old hosting until the new site is live and your redirects are tested. Make sure you own the accounts too.

What Should You Check the Day It Goes Live?

Set aside an hour on launch day. Most of these take a couple of minutes each.

• Try your old addresses. Paste 10 of your top old pages into a browser. Each one should land on the matching new page, not the home page or an error. For a bigger site, Google's guide names a crawler called Screaming Frog.
• Read your robots.txt. Go to yourdomain.com/robots.txt. If you see “Disallow: /” under “User-agent: *”, the whole site is blocked. Get it fixed now.
• Search for noindex. Open your home page and a couple of service pages, view the page source and search for the word. Search Console's URL Inspection tool shows you what Google actually received.
• Submit the new sitemap in Search Console, under Sitemaps.
• Moved to a new domain? File a Change of Address in Search Console for both the www and non-www versions of the old domain. Google says you only need this tool when moving between domains or subdomains.
• Run a real lead through it. Fill in the form and tap the call button on your phone. Then confirm the lead arrived and the conversion shows up in your reports.
• Update the links you control. Google's list names social profiles and ad campaigns. We'd add your Google Business Profile website link and your directory listings.

Then leave the redirects on. The site move guide says “generally at least 1 year”. The Change of Address page says “at least 180 days”. Go with the longer one, and if you changed domains, keep paying for the old one. Google recommends “at least a year” so nobody else can buy it and misuse it.

What If Your Rankings Already Dropped?

Work through this in order. The first two steps are quick, and they rule out the worst problems first.

1. Check the hide settings. Look at robots.txt and noindex as above. If one is on, fix it today.
2. Open the Page Indexing report in Search Console. Look for “Not found (404)”, “Soft 404”, “Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag” and “Blocked by robots.txt”. A jump in any of them after your launch date is your lead.
3. Compare before and after. In Performance, compare the weeks since launch to the same stretch before it, then open the Pages tab. Take the pages that lost the most clicks and ask three things. Does the page still exist? Does its old address redirect to the right place? Did the words change?
4. Put back what's missing. Add the redirects, even if they're late. Anyone following an old link lands in the right place, and Google picks it up when it next crawls the old address. If the old site is gone, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine at web.archive.org may still have copies of your pages and addresses.
5. Ask Google to recrawl. Submit a sitemap for many pages or use URL Inspection for a few. Google says crawling “can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks”, and asking again for the same page won't speed it up.
6. Rule out other causes. The launch might not be the reason. A core update can land the same month. If only your map rankings moved, start with your Business Profile and its website link.

Google gives rough timeframes, not a deadline, so don't pick a date and wait. A dead address won't fix itself with time.

Do You Even Need a New Website Right Now?

Not always. If the site brings in calls and your only complaint is that you're tired of looking at it, think hard. Our view is that performance beats looks, so don't get too attached to any website, including a new one.

Good reasons to rebuild:

• One page tries to cover every service and every town.
• It's slow on a phone, and a quick fix won't solve it.
• You can't edit it, or you don't own it.
• It gets visitors but no calls, and you've already worked through the usual fixes.

Weak reasons to rebuild:

• It looks a bit dated, but the phone still rings.
• A competitor just got a new one.
• Someone offered you a cheap redo in a cold call.

If you do go ahead, see what a contractor website costs first, and put this list in the quote so the redirects are part of the job.

How This Guide Was Put Together

This guide is built from Google's Search Central guides on site moves, hosting changes, noindex and recrawling, plus its Change of Address help page, all read on November 4, 2026. The Search Console report names and the WordPress setting come from using those products, not from those guides.

We didn't run a before-and-after test for this post, so you won't find a recovery percentage here. Google's docs don't give one either. The opinions are ours, and we've marked them.

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