The RV park website redesign checklist

A new park website usually looks better and performs worse for several months. The cause is nearly always the same: URLs changed, and nothing was put in place to carry the old ones forward.

Everything else on this page is recoverable. That one is not, once the traffic has gone and the rankings have been reassigned.

Before anything is built

1. Export every current URL. Every page, including ones nobody remembers. This list is the single most important artefact in a redesign.
2. Record which pages get traffic. From analytics and Search Console, so the pages that matter are known rather than guessed.
3. Record what each page currently ranks for. Otherwise there is no way to tell afterwards whether something was lost.
4. Save the current titles and meta descriptions. Often years of refinement that gets discarded by accident.
5. Screenshot the pages that convert. The layout that produced bookings is worth understanding before replacing it.
6. Note every form and where it sends. Forms silently stop working in redesigns more often than anything else.
7. Confirm who controls the domain and hosting. Discovering this mid-migration is a bad afternoon.

The first item deserves emphasis. A park that cannot list its current URLs cannot redirect them, and cannot prove afterwards what it used to have.

Deciding what the new site is for

A redesign driven by the site looking dated tends to produce a site that looks current and does the same job badly.

• What should a visitor do? Book, call, or check availability. Pick the primary one.
• What are the five questions the office answers on the phone every week? Each is a page.
• What is being lost because the current site does not answer it?
• Which pages earn their place, and which exist because nobody removed them?

A redesign is the cheapest moment to add the pages a park has been missing. It is much harder to justify a month later.

While it is being built

1. Block the staging site from indexing, and write a note to remove that block at launch. This is how sites launch invisible.
2. Map every old URL to a new one in a spreadsheet, with a row per page and no blanks.
3. Move the content that was working rather than rewriting everything for its own sake.
4. Rebuild the structured data, per schema markup for RV parks.
5. Carry the analytics and Search Console setup across, including any conversion tracking.
6. Test every form to a real inbox, from a phone as well as a computer.
7. Compress the photographs properly, which is the largest speed factor at a park.

Launch day

1. Remove the indexing block. Check it, rather than assuming it was done.
2. Test twenty old URLs by hand, including deep ones, and confirm each lands in one hop.
3. Submit the new sitemap in Search Console.
4. Submit a fresh test through every form and confirm it arrives.
5. Check the site on a phone, on mobile data rather than the office network.
6. Confirm the phone number and address match the Google Business Profile exactly.
7. Check the booking link works and carries any tracking parameters.

The weeks after

This is when problems surface, and when nobody is looking any more.

• Watch Search Console for crawl errors weekly for a month. Broken redirects appear here first.
• Compare traffic against the same period last year, not against last month, because parks are seasonal.
• Expect a dip. A modest, recovering dip is normal. A sustained drop after six weeks means something is wrong.
• Check the pages that used to rank against the list recorded at the start.
• Keep the old site backed up for a year. It is the only way to recover content nobody noticed was missing.

When not to redesign

Worth asking before spending the money.

A site that is slow, hard to use on a phone, or missing the pages campers search for can often be fixed rather than replaced. Those are the faults that cost bookings, and none of them requires starting again.

A redesign earns its cost in three situations. The site cannot be edited. It is not secure. Or its structure genuinely cannot hold the pages a park needs.

Looking dated is a weaker reason than it feels.