Website relaunch with TYPO3

A relaunch without starting from zero

In a relaunch, what is most often lost is what you cannot see: rankings, inbound links and editorial routines that worked.

A new design is decided quickly. The part that decides between success and failure is unspectacular: which pages exist today, which of them bring visitors, what they will be called on the new site — and what happens to the ones that disappear. We draw up that list before the first line of template is written.

What we watch for

• A complete old-to-new URL map. Every address that works today gets a target or a deliberate decision that it goes. Permanent redirects, no chains.
• Content is carried over and tidied up. Not rewritten, but not copied blindly either. What nobody has opened for years does not come along.
• A measurable before-and-after. Load time, Core Web Vitals, accessibility and indexing status are recorded before and after the relaunch.
• Editors are trained before go-live. Not afterwards, when the first urgent change is due.
• Monitoring in the first weeks. 404s, indexing problems and drops in traffic are actively watched rather than waited out.

Relaunch or upgrade?

A question that comes up early and saves a lot of money when answered honestly. If the structure of the website still works and only the technology is out of date, you need a TYPO3 upgrade and not a relaunch. If the content and the navigation no longer match the organisation, not even the newest TYPO3 version will help.

Often the right order is: the upgrade first, so the foundation is sound, then the relaunch on a current installation. Together that costs less than a relaunch dragging three version jumps along with it.

How we measure success

A relaunch has worked when it can be demonstrated. We record four values before the rebuild and again afterwards:

• Largest Contentful Paint below 2.5 seconds. Google's threshold for “good” – measured in the field, not in the lab.
• Interaction to Next Paint below 200 milliseconds. An official Core Web Vital since March 2024, and therefore a ranking factor.
• Cumulative Layout Shift below 0.1. Nothing jumps while loading – the most common cause of mis-taps on mobile devices.
• WCAG 2.2 level AA. Checked with automated tests and sampled by keyboard, because roughly a third of the criteria cannot be tested by machine at all.

On top of that comes indexing status: how many addresses were indexed in Google Search Console before, and how many are 4 weeks after go-live. A drop shows up there first.

Redirects

Every old address gets a redirect with status code 301, not 302 – only the permanent variant passes the standing of the old address on to the new one. We resolve redirect chains: each additional hop costs loading time, and beyond 5 hops most crawlers give up.