Boards relaunch because the site “looks old”. Search Console then turns red. Google remembers URLs, not moods. New theme, new slugs, missing 301s — years of commercial queries vanish overnight.
Inventory first
Which URLs bring traffic and enquiries? Search Console plus form sources. No inventory, no relaunch — a bet. HED Creative builds that list in discovery.
URL map and 301s
Old → new one-to-one. Dumping category pages onto home kills rankings. Parameters, slashes, http/https become one decision. Design does not lock before the map exists.
Content mapping
Old commercial H1s need a home. Two new URLs on the same keyword is cannibalization. The blog stays independent; the relaunch does not clone it.
Technical health in the same sprint
A new JS stack that will not crawl is a pretty outage. robots, canonical, hreflang, speed. IndexNow and sitemap update on ship day so publishers see the new truth.
Thirty days after go-live
404s, soft 404s, bad redirects, a broken form. If nobody owns that window, the story becomes “the new site failed”. A partner or internal team turns those 30 days into a backlog.
If you will relaunch, we start with which URLs make money. Paste the old sitemap in the form — map, then proposal.