The Website Relaunch Checklist: 10 Things We Missed on Our Own Site

We relaunched 914digital.com this year. New design, new theme, new structure. It looked great. Then our search rankings started slipping, and when we finally audited the site properly, we found a list of problems we’d have caught on any client’s site in an afternoon.

Relaunches break things quietly. Nothing looks wrong to a visitor, but Google sees redirects going in circles, pages with no descriptions and old addresses leading nowhere. Here’s everything we found on our own site, how to check yours, and how to fix it.

1. Redirects that loop forever

What we found: two of our service pages, Content Marketing and SEO, redirected to themselves. Visitors and Google got stuck in a loop and the pages never loaded.

How it happens: a redirect is set up for an address without a trailing slash, like /services/seo, pointing to the same address with one. Many redirect tools treat those as the same URL, so the page redirects to itself.

How to check: open each important page in a private browser window. If it spins and shows “too many redirects,” you’ve found one. A crawler or link checker will catch these across the whole site.

How to fix: point the redirect at a different, live page, or delete it if the page itself should load.

2. Redirects that point to the wrong page

What we found: the “WordPress Development” link in our footer, on every page of the site, redirected to our Westchester web design page instead of our WordPress service. Another redirect sent our old managed hosting address to a page that no longer existed.

How to check: open your redirect manager (on WordPress, often the Redirection plugin) and click through every rule. Make sure each one lands on the page you’d actually want a visitor to see.

How to fix: update the destination. Redirects made in a hurry during a launch are the ones most likely to be wrong.

3. Redirects hiding pages you still want

What we found: an old blog post was still published, but a redirect sent everyone who tried to read it to our blog page instead, 258 visitors so far. The post was effectively invisible.

How to check: compare your redirect list with your published pages and posts. Any redirect whose starting address matches a live page is hiding that page.

How to fix: decide which one you want. If the page should be seen, delete the redirect. If it shouldn’t, unpublish it and keep the redirect.

4. Old pages still published and in your sitemap

What we found: six service pages from the old site were still published and listed in our sitemap, even though redirects sent visitors elsewhere. We were telling Google “index this page” and “this page has moved” at the same time.

How to check: open yoursite.com/sitemap_index.xml and look for pages that belong to the old site.

How to fix: set old pages to draft. They drop out of the sitemap, and the redirects keep handling anyone who follows an old link.

5. Meta descriptions that are missing, or saved but not showing

What we found: 77 of our 143 pages showed no meta description in search results. The strange part: 43 of them had descriptions saved. Our SEO plugin’s internal index was out of date, so the descriptions never made it onto the page.

How to check: view the source of a few pages and search for meta name="description". Don’t just check that it’s filled in inside WordPress; check what the live page actually outputs.

How to fix: write the missing ones, around 120 to 160 characters each and specific to the page. For the stuck ones, re-saving the same text doesn’t help; change it and change it back so the plugin rebuilds its index.

6. Several pages competing for the same search

What we found: seven different addresses were showing up in Google for “web design Westchester” and “web design White Plains,” including old landing pages and a duplicate with “-2” on the end. Instead of one strong page, we had seven weak ones splitting the credit.

How to check: in Google Search Console, open Performance, click an important search phrase, then the Pages tab. More than one page listed means they’re competing.

How to fix: pick the best page for that search and redirect the others to it.

7. Generic page titles

What we found: our home page ranked near the top for local web design searches but got almost no clicks. Its title, “914Digital | Digital Agency in Westchester, NY,” didn’t include the words people were actually searching for. Our About, Services and Contact pages had default titles like “About – 914Digital.”

How to check: search for your own business and read your titles the way a stranger would. Would you click?

How to fix: write titles around what people search, under about 60 characters so they don’t get cut off. Ours is now “Westchester Web Design & WordPress Development | 914Digital.”

8. Links that bounce through redirects

What we found: links in our footer, on every page, pointed to old addresses that redirected to the new ones. Each one still worked, but every click took an extra hop, multiplied across the whole site.

How to check: run a link checker across your site and look for internal links that return a redirect instead of the page itself.

How to fix: update your menus, footer and templates to link straight to the final address.

9. Old addresses that now lead nowhere

What we found: more than 50 addresses from our old site, including old portfolio projects, service pages and account pages, now returned “page not found.”

How to check: the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine keeps a history of your site’s addresses. Your redirect plugin’s 404 log shows which missing pages real visitors are hitting.

How to fix: redirect each old address to its closest match today. Don’t redirect everything to your home page; Google treats that as a dead end anyway. Old posts with no modern equivalent can stay gone.

10. Missing business information for Google

What we found: our site never told Google it was a business. No logo, no linked social profiles. Our SEO plugin had our name, but without a logo it didn’t output anything at all.

How to check: paste your home page into Google’s Rich Results Test and look for an “Organization” item.

How to fix: in Yoast SEO, open Settings, then Site representation, and add your logo (at least 112 pixels square) and your social profiles.

The lesson

None of these problems were visible from the front of the site. That’s what makes relaunches risky: everything looks finished, so nobody checks the plumbing. If you’re planning a redesign, put this list on your launch checklist. If you’ve already relaunched, it’s worth an afternoon to go through it.

We fixed everything on this list. We’ll report back on what it does for our rankings.