A salon website redesign should improve the customer experience without carelessly removing pages, booking routes or information that already works.
No migration can guarantee unchanged rankings. However, planning the move gives you a better chance of finding problems before clients and search engines encounter them.
Record the existing website
Make a list of public URLs, including treatment pages, staff profiles, location pages and useful articles. Record each page’s purpose and whether you will keep, replace or remove it.
If available, use Search Console and analytics to identify pages receiving search traffic or producing enquiries. If you have no reporting, start with the sitemap, navigation and a crawl of the current site rather than assuming only the homepage matters.
Keep a recoverable backup of the old website and record the domain’s DNS settings before changing hosting.
Preserve useful URLs where practical
If an existing treatment page will continue to serve the same purpose, keeping its URL can avoid an unnecessary change.
Where a URL changes, map it to the most relevant replacement and implement a permanent server-side redirect. Sending every removed page to the homepage does not give visitors an equivalent answer.
If a service has genuinely disappeared and has no suitable replacement, decide how that URL should be handled rather than inventing an unrelated destination.
Protect the booking journey
Check every booking button, including links on treatment pages, mobile menus and old campaigns. Confirm that each opens the right salon, practitioner or service where your provider supports those choices.
Update the booking platform’s links back to your website if necessary. Test enquiry delivery as well as the appearance of the form.
Check the new pages before launch
Review titles, descriptions, main headings and canonical URLs. Confirm that intended public pages can be indexed and that temporary preview restrictions will not carry into the live site.
Test the new site on a phone. Prices, opening times, contact details and address information should agree across the website and booking platform.
Separate website changes from email settings
Changing where the website points does not automatically require changing email records. Identify the records required by the new host and preserve unrelated email configuration unless an email migration is explicitly planned.
Recheck after the switch
Visit important old URLs and confirm the intended destinations. Check HTTPS, the sitemap, booking links and test enquiries on the live domain. Monitor Search Console for indexing issues and compare performance with your baseline when enough data is available.
Do I need to keep the old design?
No. Preserve useful content and working journeys where appropriate while improving the design. Keeping a URL does not require keeping the old layout.
Is launch day the end of the migration?
No. Allow time for live checks and follow-up monitoring; some problems only become apparent after the domain switches.
A redesign is a good moment to decide whether your main services need separate treatment pages and to fix common salon booking page mistakes. For what a wider redesign involves, see website redesign services.
Planning a replacement site? See beauty salon website design or contact Gee Web Design with your existing URL and launch plans.