Treat search visibility as a launch requirement for the redesign. Most ranking losses come from broken URLs, missing redirects and dropped content, and you can prevent all three.

**Before the redesign**
1. **Benchmark.** Record your current rankings, organic traffic and top landing pages, and crawl the whole site. Google Search Console and Analytics will give you this data.
2. **Identify what ranks.** List the pages that earn traffic and backlinks. Keep their content, headings, titles and meta descriptions largely intact.
3. **Keep URLs the same where you can.** The safest redesign leaves URLs unchanged. Google treats a redesign or CMS change with no URL changes as the lower-risk kind of site move.

**During the build**
4. **Map every old URL to its new equivalent, and use 301 (or 308) redirects.** Send each old URL straight to the final page, not to the homepage. Avoid chains. Google advises keeping any chain short, ideally no more than 3 hops.
5. **Preserve on-page SEO.** Keep title tags, meta descriptions, the H1/H2 structure, image alt text, structured data and internal links.
6. **Keep content crawlable.** Don't hide text behind scripts or tabs that Google can't render. Don't leave a "noindex" tag or a robots.txt block in place from the staging site.
7. **Don't make performance worse.** Test mobile layout, Core Web Vitals and page speed on staging.
8. **Test on staging.** Crawl it, check that the redirects work, and confirm the canonical tags and XML sitemap are correct.

**At launch and after**
9. **Submit the new sitemap** in Search Console, and check that the robots.txt file is correct.
10. **Keep the redirects in place for at least a year.** Google recommends this.
11. **Monitor closely for 4–8 weeks.** Watch Search Console for 404s, indexing errors, and drops in coverage, clicks or rankings, and fix problems quickly. Small, temporary fluctuations are normal.
12. **Launch at a quiet time.** Avoid your busiest season so any dip costs less.

One caveat: the Google site-move pages I found came through secondary sources, such as news coverage and a migration blog. I didn't open Google's own documentation, so check it directly before you launch.

SOURCES:
https://www.infidigit.com/blog/seo-checklist-for-website-redesign/
https://optasy.com/blog/how-keep-your-seo-when-redesigning-website-12-things-check
https://www.element8.ae/blogs/website-redesign-without-losing-seo
https://attractgroup.com/blog/website-redesign-seo/
https://seroundtable.com/google-site-moving-18672.html
https://ecorpit.com/ecorpit-seo-safe-replatform-migration-service-india-2026/
https://searchenginewatch.com/2014/06/10/google-updates-site-move-guidelines/