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A science company often outgrows its first website long before it outgrows the knowledge inside it. Application notes, publications, technical papers and old news pages keep bringing specialist readers in from search, often to addresses nobody on the team remembers. A redesign that changes the structure changes those addresses too.
The project needs two records before anyone designs a page. The first says what the new site must help each visitor decide, and our website brief template sets it out. The second lists every address the current site has and what each one earns. This guide covers the second record and the launch that follows.
Take the inventory before design
Export the full list of addresses and what each one does today. Four sources cover most of it.
Where the inventory comes from
- Search Console performance
The queries, clicks and impressions for each page, over at least a full year so seasonal swings show.
- Search Console links
The pages other sites link to. A moved page without a redirect loses those links.
- Analytics
The pages where visits start and the pages people read before an enquiry, sample request or download.
- A site crawl
Every address with its title, description, canonical tag, status code and internal links, including PDFs and old pages left out of the navigation.
Put each address on one row of a sheet. Record its title, main topic, the queries that bring visitors, the links pointing to it, the enquiries it precedes and its destination on the new site. Note which pages are indexed today, as a record of the present.
A page with modest traffic from a specialist query can matter more to the business than a popular general article. A procurement lead searching for one application is a single visit, and it may be the visit that becomes a sample request. Keep the pages that answer real questions, even where the new design would look tidier without them.
Decide what happens to every address
Each row in the sheet gets one of four decisions.
One decision for each existing address
- The page earns visits, links or enquiries and its topic staysKeep the address and improve the page.
- The topic stays and the address has to changeMove it with a permanent (301) redirect to the new page that answers the same need.
- Two pages answer the same questionMerge them into the stronger page and redirect the other to it.
- The page no longer serves any readerRetire it. Let it return a not-found status, or redirect it where a close equivalent exists.
Send each old address to the page that answers the same reader need. A redirect from a specific application note to the homepage tells the searcher, and the search engine, that the answer has gone.
Build the redirect map as a sheet with two columns, old address and new address, and give it one owner. Test every redirect on the staging site and again after launch. Point each one straight at its final page, with no chains of one redirect leading to another. Then update the internal links, the navigation and the sitemap to the final addresses, so the site stops relying on its own redirects.
Old addresses survive in places nobody thinks to look. When we rebuilt our own site, automated checks caught six articles still linking a course at an old address. How to Build a Website Your Team Can Update With AI describes those checks. Run the same kind of check by machine before launch.
Keep the evidence where people can find it
Biotech sites carry experimental results, mechanisms, charts, regulatory statements and readiness language, and a redesign touches all of it. Review each claim against its source and its conditions as it moves. A new homepage sentence has to keep the boundary of the result beneath it, so a preliminary result stays labelled as preliminary.
Give each material claim an owner, and keep the referenced documents, the test conditions and the publication dates on the page. Treat PDFs as pages. Technical papers and posters are often what other sites link to and what reviewers cite, so give each one an address on the new site and a redirect from the old one. Our guide to the scientific claims evidence register sets out how to record each claim with its source and its stage.
Outside reviewers work from what is public. Andrew Behar, CEO of As You Sow, which scores companies on publicly available data, said so in our interview with him. "It is critical that the data is publicly available, otherwise it is not considered to be a material disclosure." For a reviewer working that way, a report that drops out of the site during a redesign drops out of the review.
The technical launch checklist
Ask the development team to confirm each line before the new site goes live.
Before launch
- New pages and redirected pages return the status you intended.
- Each redirect goes straight to its final destination.
- Canonical tags point to the final address on the hostname you chose.
- Robots rules, noindex tags and logins leave important pages open to search engines.
- Important links are ordinary HTML links a crawler can follow.
- Each page has its own title, heading and description, matched to its topic.
- Structured data, where you use it, matches what a reader sees on the page.
- The XML sitemap lists the canonical, indexable addresses and nothing else.
- Navigation, forms and downloads work on a phone.
- Search Console stays verified for the site, and analytics still record enquiries as far as consent allows.
If the domain itself changes, Search Console has a Change of Address tool for telling Google about the move. Google's guide to moving a site with URL changes sets out the full sequence, and your developer should work from it.
The checklist protects what the site already earns. Rankings can move after any redesign, because the content, the structure and the links all change, and search engines assess the new site on what it now contains.
Launch so you can diagnose
Record the launch date, the final redirect map and a baseline from the weeks before the change. Check the priority redirects and pages on launch day. Over the following weeks, watch Search Console for crawl errors, pages dropped from the index and shifts in the queries that bring visitors. Compare enquiries and sample requests with the baseline as well as visits.
Read each change against its likely cause before you rewrite anything. A seasonal dip in searches can look like a migration problem, and a spike from automated crawlers can look like growth. Keep the redirects in place for the long term, because old links on other sites and in people's bookmarks keep arriving.
Changing the domain, the structure and the content in one launch makes any later change in search traffic hard to trace. Where the timetable allows, move in stages.
What a good redesign leaves behind
A qualified buyer finds the offer faster. A technical reviewer can still reach the evidence. The people who found the company through a specialist search still arrive at a page that answers them. Brief the project against all three.
Whoever builds the new site, agree at scoping who owns the redirect map, who checks each claim and who exports the baseline. Our website work for science and climate companies covers the architecture, the words and the design together, and can include the build.
Sources and further reading
- How to move a site, Google Search Central
- Redirects and Google Search, Google Search Central
- Andrew Behar, As You Sow, interview, Brighter Future
- How to Build a Website Your Team Can Update With AI, Brighter Future
- Twelve decisions to make before you commission a deep tech website, Brighter Future
- Ten climate-tech website claims that need evidence beside them, Brighter Future
- Website design for science and climate tech companies, Brighter Future
Studio serviceWebsite design for science and climate companies
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