Inventory existing pages
Export URLs and identify pages receiving visits, enquiries or external links. Search Console and analytics help distinguish strong content from pages needing improvement. A visual redesign alone is not a reason to delete a useful page.
Map addresses deliberately
Keep an existing address when its subject remains the same. Where it changes, prepare a permanent redirect to the equivalent new page. Sending every old URL to the homepage does not help visitors find the content they expected.
Check the public release
Review titles, descriptions, links, images and mobile usability on staging. At launch, make sure public pages can be crawled and canonical URLs and sitemaps use the production domain.
Monitor the transition
Watch for errors, indexing changes and enquiries over an appropriate period, allowing for seasonality. Good preparation reduces avoidable mistakes but does not guarantee a fixed ranking.