After a Website Redesign, Check Your Old Links: How Dead Pages Quietly Cost You Leads

When a website is redesigned, the new pages get all the attention. Meanwhile the old addresses keep floating around the internet, in Google results, directory listings, old emails, printed flyers, and other sites that once linked to you. If those addresses now lead to an error page, every visit is a lead you paid for and then lost.

Why old links keep getting clicked

A web address does not disappear because you stopped using it. Search engines remember it for a while. Your Google Business Profile might point at a page that no longer exists. A local news article, a chamber of commerce listing, or a supplier’s website may still link to your old service page. Customers also bookmark things, and some text messages and emails sit in inboxes for years.

When someone follows one of these links and lands on a “page not found” message, most will not hunt for the right page. They go back and call the next business on the list. You cannot see this loss in your reports unless you look for it.

How to find the broken ones

Start with what you already control. Before the redesign goes live, export a list of the old pages. Many website platforms can do this, and so can a free crawling tool. Keep that list. After launch, open Google Search Console, if you have it set up, and look at the pages report for addresses marked not found. These are old addresses Google still knows about, which makes them the highest priority.

Then check the places you list your business. Click your website link in your Google Business Profile, your main directory listings, and your social profiles. It takes ten minutes and often turns up a link that was missed. Check your email signature and any saved quote templates too.

Redirect each one to the closest match

The fix is called a redirect: an instruction that sends anyone asking for the old address to the right new page. A “permanent” redirect is the standard choice when a page has moved for good. The key is matching each old page to the most relevant new one. An old page about water heater repair should go to the new water heater page, not the homepage. Sending everything to the homepage is better than an error, but it frustrates visitors and gives search engines less to work with.

A tool can help with the tedious part. AI is fairly good at taking a list of old addresses and a list of new ones and proposing which goes with which, based on the page names and content. That saves real time on a site with dozens of pages. But review the matches yourself. A model may pair two pages that look similar but serve different services or cities, and a wrong redirect can be worse than none.

What to decide yourself

Some pages should not be redirected at all. If you stopped offering a service or left a city, a redirect to an unrelated page is misleading. In that case a helpful “we no longer offer this” page, with a phone number and a link to what you do offer, is more honest. That is a business decision, not a technical one.

After the redirects are in place, test a handful by hand on your phone, then recheck Search Console in a few weeks to see whether the not-found list is shrinking. Add the same check to any future redesign plan as a standing item. A new site is only an improvement if the people who were already coming can still find their way in.