A reader wrote to me about a site she manages for a small association of unusual holiday rentals. She had already done the local groundwork — a Google Business Profile, listings in tourism directories — and now wanted to rebuild the site itself. Her question fitted in one sentence. If I delete pages and publish new ones on clean URLs, how do I get the old addresses out of Google without losing the visibility I have built?
That is the central question of every redesign, whether you run a campsite, a guesthouse or an independent hotel. It is also the one most often answered too late, once the new site is live and errors are surfacing in Search Console.
What follows is the answer I gave her: what to inventory first, which rule applies to each old page, how to set redirects up on WordPress, and what to watch after launch.
Why the website carries so much weight in accommodation
For an accommodation business the website is the one channel where a booking arrives without a commission attached. When rankings drop after a redesign the demand does not disappear — it moves to the booking platforms, and it comes back at a price.
The dependence is real, though measurement is patchy. The French government's France Num barometer 2025, a survey of 11,021 French small and medium businesses, found that 70% of accommodation and food service firms had a website, against 65% across all sectors. Those are French figures, describing French businesses. The direction is the point: in this sector, a badly handled redesign hits revenue, not just traffic.
Before you touch the site: the inventory
You cannot redirect what you have not listed. The first step is a complete list of existing URLs, each one qualified. Four sources are enough for a site of a few hundred pages.
| Source | What it gives you | Tool |
|---|---|---|
| Site crawl | Reachable URLs, titles, duplicates, orphan pages | Screaming Frog (free up to 500 URLs) or equivalent |
| Search Console | Pages receiving clicks and impressions over 16 months, and their queries | Performance report, export by page |
| Analytics | Pages viewed, landing pages, traffic sources | GA4, Matomo or whatever is installed |
| Inbound links | Pages other sites link to — tourist boards, press, directories | Links report, or a backlink tool |
The output is a table with one row per URL: traffic, positions, inbound links and a decision column. It is the most important document of the project — the redirect plan first, the post-launch checklist afterwards. This stage is what a technical SEO audit is for.
Duplicates, deletions, new URLs: the rule for each case
The reader's question was about pages that will no longer exist. The answer depends on what each page is worth today, and comes down to four cases.
| Situation | Action | Why |
|---|---|---|
| The page has an equivalent on the new site | 301 redirect to the new page | Passes on the value already earned and spares visitors arriving from links and bookmarks |
| Several duplicate pages are merged into one | 301 redirect from each duplicate to the consolidated page | One strong page beats three weak pages competing on the same subject |
| It disappears, with no traffic and no inbound links | Let it return 404 or 410 | Google treats both codes alike and drops the URL from its index |
| It disappears but still receives traffic or links | 301 redirect to the closest page by subject | The visitor finds a useful answer instead of an error |
Two details come from Google's documentation on site moves with URL changes. Redirects should stay in place for at least a year, and ideally for as long as anyone still follows them. And content that is not carried over must return a genuine 404 or 410, not an error message served with a 200 status: Search Console would flag that as a soft 404 and the URL would linger in the index.
Two mistakes recur. The first is redirecting every deleted page to the home page — to Google, a redirect with no subject relationship is treated as an error. The second is blocking old URLs in robots.txt to make them disappear: Google is explicit that robots.txt is not a removal method, because a blocked crawler sees neither the redirect nor the 404.
Putting the redirects in place on WordPress
Most small accommodation sites run on WordPress. PHP snippets dropped into the theme are a bad idea: they vanish the first time the theme changes. Three options hold up over time.
- A redirect plugin (Redirection, or the module built into Yoast SEO Premium or Rank Math): the simplest route for a small team. Rules are entered from the admin, and the 404 log catches the ones you missed.
- Rules in .htaccess or the server configuration: faster, and better suited to pattern rules — a whole old directory to a new category. Needs server access and careful testing.
- Keeping URLs that already work: if a page ranks well and its address is readable, leave it. Every redirect you avoid is one less thing to break.
A pattern rule in Apache looks like this:
Redirect 301 /old-page/ https://example.com/new-page/
RedirectMatch 301 ^/cabins/(.*)$ https://example.com/accommodation/cabins/$1Two rules matter more than the method. A redirect points straight at the final URL, never at another redirect: chains slow the page down and dilute the signal. And if the move to HTTPS is still outstanding, handle it in the same step. Google notes that changing paths on the same domain does not require the Search Console Change of Address tool, which is for domain moves. For the wider picture, the website redesign guide covers scoping and sequencing.
What the redesign should fix at the same time
Mobile and speed
An accommodation site is heavy by nature: photo galleries, maps, booking widgets. Google assesses page experience through the Core Web Vitals, measured on real visits at the 75th percentile: LCP under 2.5 seconds, INP under 200 milliseconds, CLS under 0.1. A redesign is the moment to reach those thresholds — compressed images, lazy-loaded galleries, reserved space for media, a firm limit on plugins and third-party scripts. Measure before and after on the home page, an accommodation page and the booking page. Problems that survive the obvious fixes are usually structural — the territory of website speed work.
An architecture that follows how travellers search
The site plan should follow the way people search: by type of accommodation (cabin, shepherd's hut, lodge, pitch), by occasion, by area. One page per type, one per bookable unit and a handful of area pages are enough for a small operator. The duplicates the reader described came from the opposite habit — several pages created over the years around one intent, none answering it fully. Merging them is the most profitable part of the redesign, provided every old address redirects to the consolidated page.
Local visibility stays the foundation
Starting with local visibility, as the reader did, was the right order. A Google Business Profile, tourist board directories and review platforms bring direct bookings long before the site ranks well. The redesign must not break that work: check that the website link on your profile and in every directory still points to a page that exists. That maintenance is part of ongoing local SEO.
After launch: keep checking for several weeks
On switchover day, test every line of the inventory: does the old URL reach the new one, in a single hop, with a 301? Crawling the list of old addresses does that in minutes. Then submit the new XML sitemap in Search Console and remove the old one.
Over the following weeks, three Search Console reports serve as your dashboard. The Pages report lists not-found URLs and soft 404s — every unexpected line is a redirect you missed. The Performance report shows whether clicks are transferring to the new addresses. The Links report confirms that your most-linked pages are still reachable. Google states that a small or medium site takes a few weeks for most of its pages to be picked up at their new addresses, so some fluctuation is expected. If old URLs persist well beyond that, an indexing check will identify what is blocking the new ones.
One last point, specific to tourism: do not switch over mid-season. Autumn or deep winter leaves time to test, find the gaps and fix them before travellers start planning again.
Common questions
How long does it take to recover traffic after a redesign?
Google states that a small or medium site takes a few weeks for most of its pages to be recognised at their new addresses. If the redirects are correct and the content has not been thinned out, traffic usually settles within two to three months. A decline still deepening after that points to a problem elsewhere.
Should I redirect or delete a page that has no equivalent?
If it receives neither traffic nor inbound links, let it return 404 or 410 and Google will drop the URL from its index. If it still gets visits or links, 301 it to the closest page by subject. Redirecting everything to the home page achieves nothing and is treated by Google as an error.
How long should 301 redirects stay in place?
Google recommends keeping them for at least a year, and preferably while anyone is still using them. Links from other sites, bookmarks and printed material point at old addresses for a long time. Removing redirects early simply brings the errors back.
Can robots.txt remove pages from Google?
No. Blocking a URL in robots.txt stops Google reading it, but not displaying it if it already knows about it. To remove a page it must return 404 or 410, be redirected, or carry a noindex tag Google is allowed to read. The Search Console removal tool only hides a URL temporarily and replaces none of those.
Do I need to change the URLs of every page in a redesign?
No. A URL that ranks well and reads clearly has no reason to change. Every redirect you avoid is one less risk. Reserve address changes for pages whose URL is unintelligible, for duplicates being merged, and for the new category structure.
When is the best time to redesign an accommodation website?
Outside your booking season, and outside the weeks when people research their trips. For most leisure accommodation that rules out spring and summer, and the run-up to school holidays. Autumn and deep winter give you room to test redirects and correct mistakes before demand returns.