A new website can be well built and still lose the visits the old one had earned. The work that protects those visits is ordinary, and it has to be finished before launch, not remembered after.
Start from the addresses people already use.
Export the current URLs, including the ones in campaigns, email signatures and documents you have already sent. Each important address needs a new home, or a deliberate decision to let it go.
A redirect should land on the page that replaced the old one, not on the homepage. A visitor who followed a link to a product, a job or a news story should still find that thing.
Titles and descriptions travel too.
Search titles, meta descriptions and the headings on the page are part of the content migration. Copying the body and leaving the title blank gives you a new page that search engines cannot explain.
Where the site is in Arabic and English, check both. A title that only exists in one language is a page that only introduces itself to half the audience.
Watch the first week on purpose.
Agree who looks at search tools and the server logs in the week after launch. The useful finds are addresses that 404, redirects that loop, and pages that dropped out of the index because they were blocked by accident.
No one can promise that every ranking will hold. You can promise that the important journeys have a redirect, that the metadata moved, and that someone is looking while the change is still fresh.
Put the map in the project, not in a spreadsheet nobody owns.
The redirect list should live with the rest of the delivery and have a name next to it. When a campaign launches a month later, that person is the one who knows whether the old link still works.
Cold Banana treats search continuity as part of a migration, alongside the content and the release plan. Bring the list of addresses you cannot afford to lose.
