In short and in plain language
A new website can be harder to find for a few weeks after it goes live. That is normal. So the start should fall in a quiet time.
Each business has its own quiet time. For building and garden work it is often winter. In shops it is the time after Christmas. For heating firms it is more the summer.
Plan back from the start date. First comes the plan. Then come texts and photos. Then everything is tested. Do not change all things at once.
Old web addresses should lead to the new pages. This is called a redirect. The redirects should stay for at least one year.
Before the start, write down how many visits and requests you get. After the start, compare with the same month last year.
Picture a landscaping business near Hildesheim that puts a new website online in April. The first weeks after the switch fall exactly into the period when the phone should ring most. If a page drops out of the search index during that time, a contact form stops delivering or an old address leads to an error page, inquiries go missing in the middle of the season. That is why Google advises in its documentation on site moves to schedule the switch for a period with little traffic: if traffic to your site is weaker in certain seasons or on certain weekdays, that is when the move should take place (Google Search Central). For many trade, landscaping and retail businesses this means planning in November, going live in January or February and re-measuring before spring. This article shows how to find your own quiet phase, plan the schedule backwards from the go-live date, make changes one at a time instead of all at once, and define measuring points before the new site goes online.
Key takeaways
- Google recommends moving a website during a period when traffic is weaker by season or on certain weekdays. Errors then have less impact, and the server has headroom for the heavier crawling that follows (Google Search Central).
- The quiet season depends on the trade: construction, roofing and landscaping have the bad-weather period from December 1 to March 31 (Section 101 SGB III), while retail makes 18.5 percent of its annual sales in November and December (HDE).
- A relaunch schedule is planned backwards from go-live: for a February launch, November for concept and address inventory, December for content, January for testing, March for re-measuring. Domain, system and layout change one at a time.
- Redirects from old to new addresses stay in place for at least one year (Google Search Central). Chains are avoided; ideally there are up to 3 and no more than 4 redirects in a row.
- Measuring points are fixed before go-live: Search Console keeps data for the last 16 months (Google Help), so the comparison runs against the same month a year earlier. The Core Web Vitals report covers the last 28 days (Search Console Help).
Why timing shapes the outcome of a relaunch
From Google's point of view, a relaunch with new addresses is a site move. Every old URL has to point to a new one, and Googlebot has to fetch both the old and the new address at least once before the move is processed for that page; Google therefore describes a migration as happening "URL by URL". For choosing the date, the documentation gives two reasons to use a slow period: any errors that occur have less impact, and the server has more computing capacity available to support Googlebot as it recrawls the site (Google Search Central). Both points hit small businesses harder than large ones. If only a handful of pages bring in inquiries, losing a single one of them shows up in the order book right away.
Then there is the time Google needs for the switch. For a small to medium-sized website, it generally takes a few weeks (Google Search Central) according to Google until most pages have been moved, and search visibility can fluctuate temporarily during this phase. Those weeks are not a breakdown but the normal process. What matters is which month they fall into: if visibility fluctuates in January, hardly any customer notices. If it fluctuates in April, you lose exactly the inquiries the new website was built for.
Whether a relaunch is worth it at all is covered in our article Website relaunch: when it is truly worth it. This article deals with the next question: once the decision has been made, when does the new site go live, and what has to be done by then, in which order? The focus is the relaunch of a website that is already found in search and already brings in inquiries. A brand-new website without existing visibility carries no migration risk, but the link to the season remains: a new site also needs time before it is found.
Relaunch with or without new addresses
Finding your own quiet season
"Winter is quiet" is true for many businesses, but not for all. Which month suits a go-live depends on when your customers search and get in touch. Four typical patterns show how different this can be; the reference points come from official statistics, statutory text and trade association figures.
| Sector | When demand is high | Typical go-live window | Reference point according to source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Construction, roofing, landscaping | Spring to fall | January and February | Bad-weather period from December 1 to March 31 (Section 101 SGB III) |
| Retail | November and December | January and February | 18.5 percent of annual sales in the last two months of the year (HDE) |
| Accommodation and day-trip restaurants | Summer months | January, or November with strong Christmas business | 25.5 million overnight stays in January 2026, 58.4 million in July 2026 (Destatis) |
| Heating, plumbing, air conditioning | Heating season | Summer | Heating season usually from October 1 to April 30 (co2online) |
For the construction trades, German law even sets a fixed bad-weather period. Book III of the Social Code sets December 1 to March 31 as the bad-weather period, during which employees are entitled to seasonal short-time allowance under the conditions it lists (Section 101 SGB III). Which businesses belong to this group is set out in the Construction Businesses Ordinance: besides main construction, it explicitly includes scaffolders, roofers and landscaping businesses. For a landscaping company, the go-live window is therefore usually January or February. The first inquiries for the season arrive in March, and by then the switch should have settled. How to make seasonal pages visible in time before the peak is described in the article Seasonal pages: be visible before the season starts.
In retail, the high season comes at the end of the year. According to the German Retail Federation, retail makes 18.5 percent of its annual sales in the last two months of the year (HDE). A relaunch in November or December puts exactly those pages at risk that carry the Christmas business: opening hours, promotions, gift cards and pickup offers. The calmer window follows right after, in January and February, with some distance from the Easter business. What to do on the existing site in the fall instead is covered in the article on getting the website ready for the Christmas trade.
In hospitality, official statistics show how strongly the season swings. In January 2026, accommodation establishments in Germany recorded 25.5 million overnight stays (Destatis); in July 2026 the figure was 58.4 million (Destatis), more than twice as many. The figures cover establishments with at least ten beds, and both values are preliminary. For guesthouses, vacation rentals and day-trip restaurants, the window is therefore in January. For a restaurant with strong Christmas business, December is ruled out, and November can be the better choice there. What a restaurant website needs before the season is shown on our page Web design for restaurants.
There is also the reverse pattern. For heating contractors, winter is the middle of the high season, because the heating period in Germany usually starts on October 1 and ends on April 30 (co2online). If a heating system fails during that time, the customer searches immediately and often on a smartphone. A relaunch fits into the summer here, when maintenance jobs and planning for new systems fill the calendar but fewer urgent inquiries come in through the website.
Your own figures are the most reliable guide. Search Console keeps the data for the last 16 months (Google Help). That is enough to read from the performance report, over a full year, which months brought your site the fewest clicks, and to compare that value later with the same month a year earlier. Your own inquiry log belongs next to it: when did calls, forms and emails come in? Besides seasonal lows, Google also mentions weak weekdays; whether your quiet day is Monday or Sunday shows up in the daily view of the report. How to read it is explained in the article Search Console: the numbers that explain your inquiries.
Planning the schedule backwards
A relaunch schedule starts at the end. First the go-live date is fixed, then you count back what has to be finished by then. Anyone who plans forward and says "we will start in November" tends, in our experience, to switch over in March or April, at the least convenient moment. For a business with a spring season and a go-live in February, a typical plan looks like this:
| Month | Work package | Result at the end of the month |
|---|---|---|
| November | Goals, site structure, inventory of all old addresses, recording baseline values | Approved concept, list of old URLs, measuring points |
| December | Texts, photos, service pages, redirect list from old to new | Content complete, every old address has a target |
| January | Build on the blocked preview, testing forms, redirects and mobile view | Sign-off with the business, date confirmed |
| February | Go-live on a quiet weekday, submitting the new sitemap, first checks | New site online, redirects active |
| March | Re-measuring against the same month a year earlier, closing gaps | Stable site before the season starts |
December is the tightest month in the plan. Holidays, company vacations and year-end closing coincide, and the content in particular depends on the business itself: only you know which services are really offered today, which photos are current and which references may be shown. In our projects, missing texts and images delay a go-live more often than technology does. Company vacations therefore belong in the plan twice: in the project calendar and in your Google profile, as the article Company holidays in your Google profile: set special hours shows.
If your high season falls elsewhere, the whole plan shifts. A heating contractor going live in July starts the concept in April; a vacation rental business going live in January starts in October. The sequence stays the same: concept, content, build and testing, then observation before the season. Small sites with few subpages get through faster, while sites that have grown over the years, with many service and location pages, need more time for the address list and the tests.
Plan the latest date at the same time
One change at a time, not all at once
Many relaunches bundle everything: a new company name, a new domain, a new content management system, a new design. Google explicitly advises against doing this in one step and puts it briefly: make the changes to your website one at a time (Google Search Central). If you want to change domain, content management system and layout, Google's example is to move the website to the new domain first and change the layout afterwards. The reason is practical: if visibility drops after a combined switch, there is no way to tell which of the steps caused it.
For a local business this usually means: if a domain change is coming, for instance after a change of company name, it is planned as a separate step with its own redirects and its own checks. The new design follows afterwards, ideally in the next quiet window. If the domain stays, the most effective simplification is to keep the existing addresses in the new system wherever they make sense. Every address that stays the same needs no redirect and cannot be redirected incorrectly.
If the domain changes, also submit a change of address in Search Console. The tool forwards signals from the old site to the new one and continues to do so for 180 days after the migration starts (Search Console Help). Search Console Help also recommends continuing to pay for the old domain for at least one year (Search Console Help) so that third parties cannot buy it and use it for malicious purposes. How to move the website and the mailbox separately is shown in the article Moving domain and email without losing mail.
- Switch hosting or server without changing any addresses, if a switch is due.
- Change the domain, with a redirect for every old address and a change of address in Search Console.
- Switch the content management system and keep as many existing paths as possible.
- Renew layout, structure and content, with a redirect for every changed address.
This order has proven itself in our projects whenever several changes are due. Between two steps there is an observation phase until Search Console shows stable values again. Not every business needs all four steps; if you only renew the design and keep both domain and system, you have a single move and therefore a single date that belongs in the quiet phase.
The redirect list: short explanation, complete records
The redirect technology is quickly explained; the real work is in the list. Every old address that has visitors, links or visibility gets a matching new target. Google recommends server-side permanent redirects such as 301 or 308. How we set this up technically is described on our service page on website relaunches; for the schedule, what matters most is where the list comes from and how long it applies.
Here the season has a second, often overlooked influence. Google advises reviewing server logs over a sensible period when looking for old addresses, taking seasonal fluctuations in traffic into account. If you build your address list in December from the visits of the last few weeks, you may not find the page about spring garden care or robotic lawn mowers at all, because hardly anyone opens it in winter. The inventory should therefore cover a full year: sitemap, Search Console, statistics and server logs together, plus images and PDF files such as price lists or brochures that are found through search.
| Case | Rule | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Page content is kept | Permanent redirect to the new address with the same content | Visitors and search engines reach the right target without a detour |
| Several old pages are merged | All old addresses to the new combined page | Google explicitly names this case as acceptable |
| Content is dropped without replacement | Status code 404 or 410 instead of a redirect to the home page | Many redirects to an unrelated target can be treated as a soft 404 |
| Redirects from an earlier relaunch | Point them straight to the new final target | Chains slow down loading, and not every browser follows long chains |
Chains build up easily when a website has moved before. Googlebot can follow up to 10 redirects in a chain, but Google recommends a direct redirect to the final destination (Google Search Central). Where that is not possible, there should ideally be up to 3 and no more than 4 (Google Search Central). For a relaunch this means old redirects from earlier moves are not left in place but rewritten to point to the new target.
And for how long? Google recommends keeping redirects as long as possible, generally for at least one year (Google Search Central). During this period Google can transfer all signals to the new addresses, including links from other websites. For a seasonal business this time frame makes intuitive sense: one year covers every season once, including pages that are only in demand in summer. From the user's perspective, according to Google, it is ideal to keep redirects indefinitely. For a domain change with the change of address tool, Search Console Help names at least 180 days (Search Console Help); the longer recommendation is the more dependable frame.
Testing: what has to be ready before the switch
The new site is built on a preview that is blocked for search engines. That very block is one of the common errors after go-live: Google lists content blocked by noindex or robots.txt as the first item in its list of migration errors. If you block the preview with robots.txt, prepare a second robots.txt in advance that goes live on the go-live day; if you use noindex, keep a list of the pages where the rule has to be removed. If the blocking file still ends up on the live site, the error lingers: Google generally caches the contents of the robots.txt file for up to 24 hours (Google Crawling Infrastructure).
- Every line of the redirect list has been tested on the preview and leads straight to its target.
- Every new page has a self-referencing canonical, and internal links point to the new addresses.
- Contact form, appointment request and phone links have been tried out, and the test message has arrived.
- The sitemap with the new addresses is ready, and Search Console ownership is verified for the new version as well.
- Legal notice, privacy policy and consent prompt have been carried over and adapted to the new system.
- Mobile view and loading time have been checked on real devices, not just in a browser window at the desk.
For the day itself, Google's note about weekdays applies. A date early in the week leaves working days for corrections, while a go-live on a Friday afternoon or before a public holiday pushes any troubleshooting into the weekend. On the first day Search Console is of little help, because its data only becomes available 48 hours after it is collected (Google Help). The first checks therefore rely on your own spot checks and the server logs: do the old addresses lead to the new ones, are there unusually many error pages, has the test inquiry arrived?
The server belongs in the test phase too. After a migration, Google temporarily crawls the new website more heavily than usual, because requests for the old addresses arrive on top via the redirects. For the site of a local business this is usually not a bottleneck, but it belongs in the coordination with your host. What matters in hosting is shown on our page on web hosting.
Setting measuring points before you start
Whether a relaunch has succeeded can only be answered if it has been decided beforehand what it will be measured against. The baseline values are recorded in November, not after go-live, when the old pages are already being redirected. Because Search Console keeps the data for the last 16 months (Google Help), the comparison can be made cleanly against the same month a year earlier. For seasonal businesses that is the fairer yardstick: a landscaping company gets more clicks in March than in February, with or without a relaunch.
Clicks per key page
Clicks and impressions of the pages with the most visits, per month and for the same month a year earlier.
Indexed addresses
In the sitemaps report, the number of indexed old addresses drops toward zero over time while the new ones rise. Both belong on the list.
Pages not found
"Not found" reports in Search Console and 404 responses in the server log. A sudden jump points to gaps in the redirect list.
Inquiries per month
Calls, forms and emails from your own log. They are the number that really matters, and they appear in no search report.
Core Web Vitals
The report covers the last 28 days (Search Console Help). For the new site it becomes meaningful about four weeks after go-live; with few visits it reports "No data available".
Loading time and forms
Your own spot checks: how fast does the home page load on mobile, does the test inquiry arrive? On go-live day and weekly after that.
A simple table with these values for the same month a year earlier, the month before go-live and the months after it is helpful. Nobody has to maintain it daily; in March it should give one clear answer: is the new site doing at least as well as the old one in the same month a year earlier? The Core Web Vitals report measures loading time over the last 28 days (Search Console Help), so a value from the first week after go-live still mostly describes the old site. More on this is in the article Core Web Vitals 2026: pass Google's ranking factor, and if you want to build on your visibility after the relaunch, see our search engine optimization services.
After go-live: re-measure before the season begins
The weeks after the switch are a period of observation. Google expects traffic to the old addresses to fall and traffic to the new ones to rise, and rankings to settle down after a while. A plan that reflects this has fixed check dates:
- Go-live day: open a sample of redirects, check robots.txt and noindex, send a test inquiry, submit the new sitemap in Search Console.
- After 48 hours: look at the first Search Console data and compare "Not found" reports with the redirect list.
- First week: review server logs daily for 404 responses and add missing redirects.
- After four weeks: read the Core Web Vitals of the new site and check the indexed new addresses in the sitemaps report.
- In March: compare clicks, impressions and inquiries with the same month a year earlier and make final corrections before the season.
- After one year: do not switch redirects off, but check which ones are still used and update your own links to the new addresses.
Fluctuations in the first weeks are normal and no reason for hasty rebuilding. A warning sign, on the other hand, is a drop limited to specific pages: usually a redirect is missing, a page has been set to noindex by mistake, or a target leads to a page with unrelated content. Because go-live is in February, there is time before the season to find and fix such cases, instead of noticing them in April when the phone stays silent.
Google also advises updating as many links as possible right at the start of the migration: internal links, profiles and ad campaigns. In your Google Business Profile, in business directories and in running ads, the new address should therefore be entered on go-live day. Every redirect a visitor does not have to take saves loading time.
A relaunch that goes live in February has until spring to reveal its errors. One that goes live in April reveals them to your customers.
When it cannot wait for the quiet season
Sometimes the date cannot be chosen freely: a content management system no longer receives security updates, the site has been attacked, or a hosting contract ends. Then the same logic helps on a smaller scale. First, only what is urgent gets done, ideally without changing addresses, for example a move to a current system or a new server with identical paths. The actual relaunch with a new structure and new design follows in the next quiet window. This separates the necessary change from the desirable one, exactly as Google describes with its principle of making changes one at a time.
Moving a site section by section is an option for large websites. For small and medium-sized websites, by contrast, Google recommends moving all addresses at once, so that users find their way around the new site more easily and Google recognizes the move faster. For most local businesses this means: one date, one switch, but that date in the quiet phase. With security problems, ongoing website maintenance takes priority over any schedule.
Do not let it slip into the high season
How we plan a relaunch in the Hildesheim area
We start every relaunch with a free analysis of the existing site: which addresses bring visitors and inquiries, which pages are only in demand during the season, when is your quiet phase? From this we build a schedule that is planned backwards from the go-live date and takes into account your season, your company vacations and the time needed for texts and photos. The new site is built on a preview blocked for search engines, we schedule the switch for a period with few visitors, and right afterwards we check that all redirects work. In the weeks that follow, we keep an eye on how visibility develops.
We agree on the dates with you in person, on site in the Hildesheim area if you wish. For trade businesses, the page Web design for trades shows which content should be in place before the season; for retailers, the page Web design for retail. If you are considering a relaunch for spring now in the fall, starting in November keeps you well on schedule. Tell us about your project via our contact page or directly on the page about website relaunches.
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