Website redesign with many town or service pages

If your website has dozens of town or service pages, the redesign is less about the look and more about the list. Find out which of those pages customers actually land on, keep those at their exact addresses, make them genuinely different from each other, and fold the empty near-copies into stronger pages with a forward. Done that way, the redesign keeps what the old pages earned and leaves you with fewer, better pages.

How sites end up with forty town pages

A common pattern: years ago someone built a page for every town in your area, each one the same text with the town name swapped. "Looking for a reliable plumber in Oak Ridge? Our Oak Ridge plumbers..." and then the same page for Elm Grove, Maple Falls and thirty more. Sometimes the same was done with services, or worse, with every service in every town.

Some of those pages bring customers. Many bring nobody, because Google sees forty copies of one page and picks a few to show. A redesign is the right moment to sort them, because you are touching every page anyway.

Step one: take an inventory

You cannot sort what you cannot see. Build a full list:

Open your sitemap. Type your address followed by /sitemap.xml (for example yourcompany.com/sitemap.xml). Most builders and WordPress sites have one, and it lists every page.
Check Google Search Console if you have it. The Pages report lists the pages Google knows about, and the Performance report, sorted by Pages, shows which ones people clicked on in search over the last months. Google Search Console for owners explains how to get in.
Ask your phone records. Callers who say "I saw your page about Maple Falls" tell you something the numbers cannot.

Put every page in a spreadsheet: its address, its topic, whether it gets clicks, and a decision column.

Step two: decide page by page

Each page gets one of three decisions.

Keep and improve. Pages that get clicks, or towns where you do a lot of work. Keep the address exactly as it is, and give the page something only that town has (more on this below).

Merge. Towns you serve but rarely work in, or tiny neighborhoods next to each other. Fold them into a nearby town page or a regional page ("North County: Elm Grove, Pine Hill and Cedar Bluff"), and forward their old addresses to it.

Retire. Pages for towns you no longer serve, or services you dropped. Forward them to the closest useful page, such as your service area page, so that old links still go somewhere sensible.

For services the logic is the same, with one test: would a customer search for this job by its own name? "Water heater replacement" and "drain cleaning" deserve their own pages. "Faucet washer replacement" probably belongs as a line on a general repairs page.

Avoid the service-times-town grid. Ten services in thirty towns is three hundred pages nobody can keep accurate, and the text on them is necessarily the same. One page per main service and one page per real town, linked to each other, is plenty for most local trades.

Step three: make each kept page worth reading

A town page earns its place by saying things that are only true of that town. You know these; a copywriter does not:

Jobs you have done there, with a photo and a sentence. "Replaced a cast-iron main line under a 1920s bungalow off Front Street."
The neighborhoods or subdivisions you work in most.
Local conditions: hard water, old clay sewer lines, clay soil, hills that make gutters overflow, a county permit office that needs a particular form.
How quickly you can usually get there, and from where.
Reviews from customers in that town, if they mention it.

Three or four honest specifics beat a page of filler. Writing town pages without copying the same page has more ideas, and when town pages help and when they hurt explains why near-copies work against you.

Keep the addresses, forward the rest

This is where large redesigns most often go wrong. A new design often comes with a new structure: the old /plumber-oak-ridge/ becomes /areas/oak-ridge/. That looks tidy, but every old address that is not forwarded becomes a dead end for anyone who had it bookmarked or found it on Google.

The safest rule: keep the exact old address for every page you keep, even if it is a little untidy. For pages you merge or retire, set a permanent forward (a "301 redirect", which tells browsers and Google the page has moved for good) from each old address to its new home. Your spreadsheet already says where each one goes.

Nobody can promise how Google will treat a redesigned site, but pages that stay at their addresses, or forward one-to-one, keep the standing they had.

Forty towns do not belong in the main menu. A clean pattern:

The menu has "Services" and "Areas we serve", each opening a short list or a page.
The "Areas we serve" page lists every town you cover, grouped by county or direction, with a link to each kept town page and plain text for the rest.
Each service page links to the towns where you do that work most; each town page links to the services people there ask for.
The footer can carry a short list of your main towns, not all of them.

On a phone, long menus are miserable. Check that someone can reach any town page in two taps.

After the switch

In the first weeks after launch, open Search Console's Pages report and look for "Not found (404)". Those are old addresses you missed. Add a forward for each one. Then check the Performance report each week to see that the pages at the top of your spreadsheet are still being clicked.

What to do this week

Open your sitemap and copy every page address into a spreadsheet.
Mark each one keep, merge or retire, starting with the pages that get clicks.
For each kept town page, write down three facts true only of that town.
Decide where each merged or retired page will forward to.

If your current site already holds the town and service pages and you want them carried over at the same addresses, you can see your site rebuilt first and check the page list against your spreadsheet before anything goes live.