Most ranking loss after a redesign is not Google ‘resetting’ you. It is broken URLs, missing titles, evaporated schema, and a homepage that used to rank for the city + specialty query and now says ‘Welcome to our new look.’
The sequence
- Crawl the current site. Export every URL, title, H1, and canonical.
- Map old → new before design is approved. Design does not get to invent slugs that fight the map.
- 301 everything that moves. No 302. No JavaScript ‘redirects.’
- Rebuild schema on the new templates, not as an afterthought.
- Preserve the copy that already ranks unless you have a better page to replace it.
- Launch with Search Console and uptime watching the first 14 days.
- Fix 404s in hours, not in the monthly report.
If an agency cannot show you the redirect map before launch, they are not doing SEO. They are doing a visual refresh and hoping.