You finally launch the new site. It looks cleaner, loads faster, and the whole team is relieved. Then a few weeks later, someone searches your church by name and the old sermon page still shows up in Google, leading to a dead end.
This is one of the most common and most preventable mistakes we see in a church website redesign. The design gets all the attention. The links quietly break in the background.
Why old links matter more than they seem
Over the years, your pages have earned a small amount of trust with Google. A sermon that got shared, an event page a local paper linked to, a giving page people bookmarked. That trust is tied to the exact web address, not to your church in general.
When you rebuild, the addresses usually change. Your old sermon lived at /sermons/hope-in-hard-times, and the new one lives somewhere else entirely. Unless you tell search engines where each old page went, every one of those links now points to nothing.
The result is invisible. No error email, no warning. Just a slow drop in the people who used to find you through search.
The fix is a 301 redirect
A 301 redirect is a small instruction that says, "this page moved permanently, send everyone to the new address instead." It forwards both the visitor and most of that hard-earned Google trust to the right place.
The step most churches skip is making a list before the old site goes away. Pull every page address the current site uses, then decide where each one should land on the new site. A sermon points to the new sermon. An old "give" page points to the new giving page. Pages with no clear match can point to the homepage, though a closer match is always better.
Once the new site is live, those redirects go into place so that anyone arriving on an old link, whether from Google, an email, or a printed bulletin from three years ago, still ends up somewhere useful.
A short checklist before you switch
If a redesign is coming this fall, protect your search traffic with a few minutes of care:
- List your current page addresses before the old site is retired.
- Map each one to its closest match on the new site.
- Set up 301 redirects for every address that is changing.
- Keep your most-linked pages at the same address when you can, so no redirect is even needed.
- Check Google Search Console after launch for pages reporting errors, and fix any you missed.
None of this changes how the new site looks. It just makes sure the people already trying to find you don't hit a wall on the way in.
A redesign should be a fresh start, not a reset to zero. If you'd like a second set of eyes on your redirect plan before you flip the switch, we're glad to help. You can reach us at developwithfaith.com/contact.