An auto repair shop relaunched its website with a slicker design, and within a month their rankings for several core service pages had quietly disappeared. Nobody on their end had touched SEO settings intentionally, which made it a genuine mystery until we started crawling.
The Situation
The redesign moved several service pages to new URLs without anyone setting up redirects, and the new site's internal navigation had been rebuilt from scratch by a designer who had no visibility into which pages mattered for search.
What We Found
A full site crawl turned up over 30 broken internal links pointing to the old URL structure, several pages that used to be linked from the homepage now buried with zero internal links pointing to them at all, and no redirects in place from the old paths to the new ones. Search engines were hitting dead ends across a meaningful chunk of the site.
What We Did
We mapped every old URL to its new equivalent and implemented proper 301 redirects, rebuilt internal navigation to make sure every important service page was reachable within two clicks of the homepage, and fixed every broken internal link we found, treating it the same way we'd treat any finding on our own SEO audit checklist.
The Result
Rankings for the affected service pages recovered within about three weeks of the fixes going live, and Search Console's crawl error report, which had been flagging dozens of 404s daily, cleared up almost entirely.
The Takeaway
A visual redesign and an SEO-safe redesign are two different projects that need to happen together, not sequentially. Before launching any redesign, a full internal link and redirect audit should be standard practice, exactly the kind of check we build into every on-page SEO checklist and cover more broadly in our technical SEO guide.
Planning a redesign and want to protect your existing rankings? Talk to Rafenthic's team before your developer flips the switch.