Hotel website redesign: planning for your existing pages and URLs

A new hotel website can look excellent while a guest following an old link to a particular room reaches a missing page. Those addresses remain in search results, emails, property profiles and saved bookmarks.

A redesign therefore has two jobs: improve the presentation and provide a sensible route for people arriving through links to the old site. URL planning belongs in the project before launch.

List the important pages

Use your current navigation, sitemap and traffic reports. Identify room, offer, contact and information pages that still matter. Add addresses used in active advertising or materials you have already sent out.

For each entry, note what the visitor is looking for. A link to an apartment should lead to information about that apartment or a genuinely appropriate replacement. This helps you judge whether the move makes sense, rather than simply whether the new address opens.

Keep addresses that still work

A visual redesign does not, by itself, require every URL to change. When a page keeps the same purpose, discuss whether its address can stay the same. Where a change is necessary, map the old address to the new one.

Your working table can have four columns: old URL, purpose, new URL and check result. Include language versions for a multilingual website. A Bulgarian page should have a clearly identified Bulgarian destination where one exists.

Redirect according to the content

For a page that has moved permanently, Google recommends an appropriate permanent redirect. It should lead directly to the matching final page without unnecessary intermediate steps. Do not send every removed URL to the homepage simply to avoid a missing-page response.

When content has been removed permanently and has no suitable replacement, the developer should return the appropriate missing-page response. See Google's redirect guidance for the technical options.

Accept the new website by completing real tasks

Check several of the most important old links on a phone and a computer. Open a specific room, continue to the enquiry form and check that the selected context is retained. Confirm that the notification arrives and includes the submitted information.

Ask the technical lead to check search-engine access, canonical URLs, internal links and the sitemap. Review protections used during development before the public launch. Record who checks these items and who accepts the result.

Allow time for monitoring after launch

Record the change date and monitor indexing, errors and traffic in Search Console. Also check that real enquiries are being received. Rankings can fluctuate after a significant change; redirects do not promise to preserve every position. See Google's guide to site moves.

When discussing a redesign with B2BWebs, include the existing website address and the list of important pages. The transition and technical SEO checks can then be part of the brief alongside the design and new content.