Website Rebuild Without Losing Rankings

The situation

The old site showed up on Google for "austra digital" through the home page and the SEO page. It also had problems we didn’t want to keep. Addresses that didn’t exist showed the home page instead of a “page not found” message, which confuses Google. And the suburb pages listed a street address in each suburb, although we have no office in any of them.

We sell safe rebuilds to clients. Doing our own carelessly wasn’t an option.

The constraints

• Pages that rank could not change. Every live page had to keep its exact address, title and Google description.
• A way back. If something broke after launch, we needed to return to the old site in minutes, not rebuild it.
• Nothing private in the upload. The project folder holds notes and working files that have no business on a public server.
• Browsers holding old files. Our hosting kept files in visitors’ browsers for up to 4 hours, so a design change could show late.

What we did

• Copied the live site first. Every title and description came from that copy, not from memory or a draft.
• Same address, same title. All 29 existing pages kept their addresses and titles. (One change came later, on purpose: on 17 September we changed the home page title.)
• Real “page not found” pages. Addresses that don’t exist now say so properly, with a helpful page.
• One address per page. Small variations of an address now send people to the one correct version in a single step.
• Honest business details for Google. We removed the suburb street addresses from all 14 suburb pages. They now say “we serve this area”, not “we are located here”.
• No stale files. Each new version of the design gets a new file name, so browsers can’t keep showing an old one.
• Safety checks before every upload. A script copies only public files and stops if it finds a hidden-page tag, a test link or a private folder.
• A way back kept. The old site stays one click from being live again, with a full backup.

What we measured

These checks ran against the live site after launch.

• 35 of 35 pages loaded with the right title and address.
• 39 page and screen-size checks passed, with no sideways scrolling, hidden text or errors.
• 0 broken links across all 35 pages.

On 17 September we ran Google’s own speed test on live pages. The phone test copies a slow mobile connection and a slow phone, which is harsher than most real visits. These are test figures, not data from real visitors.

• Phone speed score 95 to 97 on the seven pages tested.
• Google’s SEO check 100 on every page tested.
• No layout jumping while pages load, on every test.
• On a phone, the main content appears in about 2.3 to 2.4 seconds, inside Google’s “good” limit of 2.5 seconds, but not by much. On a computer it takes about half a second.

What the check-up found afterwards

Three days after launch we checked the site as if it were a client’s. It found work we hadn’t finished.

• Old links went nowhere. Addresses from the old site, like old blog posts, showed “page not found”. We wrote 31 forwarding rules, each pointing to the closest page.
• The design file is too big. Most of it isn’t used on any one page, and it’s most of the phone loading time.
• Working notes were inside the pages, up to 43 percent of the home page’s size. The build now removes them.

Update, 4 October 2026: the 31 forwarding rules and the notes clean-up are live. The design file work hasn’t been done yet.

The outcome so far

We don’t know yet whether Google rankings held, and it’s too early to say. A fair before-and-after needs about 60 to 90 days of Google data. What we can say is that nothing Google already had was changed by accident. Every existing page answers at the same address with the same title, the confusing “page not found” problem is gone, and the business details no longer claim addresses we don’t have.

What we’re watching

• How many pages Google lists. We aren’t changing any other title or description for 30 days after launch, so any movement can be traced to the rebuild.
• Google’s list of missing pages, for any old address that still gets seen and needs forwarding.
• That Google reads the new page list, not the old site’s, which no longer exists.
• How often we show up and get clicked for our name and for the SEO page over the next 60 to 90 days. When we have that data, we’ll add it here with the dates.

Disclosure. This is our own website, so treat it as evidence of how we run a rebuild, not as a client reference. The client references are on the other case studies.