Why your organic traffic dropped after your website redesign
The goal of any website redesign project is to make it better for your audience, right? Freshening it up helps improve the user experience and drive more traffic, leads, and conversions.
So, seeing your organic traffic drop after a redesign or site migration can be frustrating — even more so when you took measures to mitigate the SEO impact.
Before you panic, rest assured that organic traffic drops after a website redesign are common. Most of the time, a loss of traffic can be attributed to failures to properly implement SEO measures or missing them before the launch of your redesign.
In this article, we take a look at why your traffic may have dropped after a website redesign and how you can help it recover.
Does website redesign affect SEO?
A website redesign can affect SEO. This is because the process involves fundamental changes to the elements of your site that search engines crawl to rank and index it. This can cause temporary drops in organic traffic, as after a redesign, the website may be treated as new and require crawling and reindexing.
SEO is an intrinsic part of web design. The relationship between web design and SEO is strengthening as Google, other search engines, and large language models (LLMs) become more focused on the user experience on websites. Web technology is also becoming more advanced, meaning web design capabilities are constantly evolving, and search engines can’t always keep up.
Maintaining SEO value during a rebrand or web redesign process is important to protect organic traffic and improve the user experience. It’s also vital for traditional and AI search as Google and LLMs want to deliver the best content to their users, just as you do.
How to analyse traffic drops after a website redesign
The key to understanding traffic drops after a website redesign is to establish the nature of the drop and align it with the potential issues that caused it. For example, is it a decline of 5-10% in traffic, or have you noticed a sudden big drop?
Understanding the data trend helps determine the cause of the traffic drop. You must arm yourself with the appropriate tools to analyse your site traffic, including:
These are some examples of different traffic trends you might have observed in your data following a website redesign, alongside some causes and solutions.
A small drop in traffic (5-10%)
Small drops in traffic and fluctuations after a website redesign are very common. They often resolve themselves in a few weeks or a couple of months, usually determined by the size of your website.
This is because, depending on the scale of your redesign, Google and other search engines need additional time to recrawl and index new pages or pages that have changed and serve the correct version to users.
However, in some instances, a small drop in traffic is an initial indicator of a bigger problem. To mitigate this, it’s worth running through a website redesign SEO checklist to ensure the drop isn’t related to any issues introduced during the site redesign:
- Check your redirects are correctly set up.
- Ensure pages haven’t been deleted by accident.
- Double-check that content isn’t restricted from indexing.
- Make sure links to key pages aren’t removed.
- Check that your content is rendering correctly.
A sudden drop in traffic (30-50%)
A sudden and significant drop in organic traffic after a change in your website design is usually consistent with a technical problem accidentally being introduced when the design was launched. Identify a spike in crawl errors in GSC or run a crawl with Screaming Frog to highlight issues with URL mapping.
Sudden drops and fluctuations are fairly common after a web redesign. However, any large drops in organic traffic of 30-50% that don’t recover within a few weeks need investigation and fixing.
Reasons for a sudden organic traffic drop
There are a few common reasons for a large, sudden drop in organic traffic when launching your new website after a redesign. Working out what could be to blame helps you apply the best possible fix to recover. Below are some of the main reasons for an organic traffic drop.
Deleted pages
Deleting pages from your site without first assessing their value and the volume of organic traffic they drive can cause sudden traffic drops.
One of the best ways to see if this is the case is to identify which pages experienced a sudden, large drop and check the website to see whether they’ve been removed. Using GSC and GA, you can compare your site traffic before and after the redesign and break your traffic down on a page-by-page basis.
In GSC, arrange your pages by “Clicks Difference”. If you notice that pages have dropped completely in clicks, the likelihood is that they’ve been removed:
For accidentally deleted pages, you’ll need to restore the original ones. Ask your developer if there’s a backup within the original version of the website before the pages were removed, as this is the easiest way to reinstate them.
If you don’t have a backup of these pages, another option is to try Wayback Machine to see if a snapshot of your old content is stored in its internet archive.
What if the content moved to a new location?
If the content from a deleted page is available at an alternative location, redirect the old URL to the new one so Google and other search engines know where to find it.
What if I wanted these pages removed?
If the removal of these pages was intentional (for example, they didn’t bring in high-quality traffic), redirect these URLs to the most appropriate alternative location, even if it’s the homepage.
Missing or incorrect redirects
Did you make changes to your URL structure or move content onto new URLs during your website redesign? If so, a sharp drop in traffic could indicate that your old content wasn’t correctly redirected to these new locations.
Like the analysis of deleted pages, you’ll want to see which pages experienced a sharp drop in traffic. If you find a correlation between the traffic drop and pages you know have moved or changed, the likelihood is that there are missing or incorrect redirects.
How do I test whether my redirects are working properly?
To test if redirects are working, look at the pages that have seen the biggest sudden drops and visit those URLs. If you’re not redirected to the new page, the redirect either isn’t working or is missing.
What’s the correct way to set up a redirect to new URLs?
When setting up redirects, use a 301 status code to indicate that the resource has been permanently relocated to the new target URL. Ensure any redirects you have set up use this status code and not a 302 or 307 temporary redirect status code.
Using a 302, for example, can affect the amount of link equity passed to the new location and negatively impact performance.
Indexing restrictions for the website or certain pages
It’s standard practice in website development to never amend a live or indexable version of a website. Therefore, developers typically use a staging environment to work on new designs, then push them live when they’re ready.
When new designs roll out across a website, it’s possible for the indexability declarations that existed on the staging site to be accidentally carried across.
Review the pages that have taken the biggest hit in organic performance, or have completely dropped off, and check the indexability of these pages using GSC’s URL inspection tool.
You should be able to quickly check if your pages have indexing issues:
If you find the issue is related to indexing, it should be fairly straightforward to resolve by assessing the Robots Exclusion Protocol you have in place and removing the instructions telling Googlebot to not index content.
Tracking issues are introduced
Tracking issues can be introduced during the website redesign process, which is more common than you may think. Luckily, they should be fairly easy to identify and fix.
If you’ve noticed your traffic has gone from tracking perfectly fine to zero sessions after the changes were implemented, this may indicate a tracking issue. Compare the data sets in Google Analytics and Google Search Console to identify any obvious discrepancies.
Equally, if you’ve noticed a very sudden uptick in traffic, it’s worth checking that you haven’t introduced multiple versions of the same tracking script to your website.
Why may you see a gradual drop in traffic after a web redesign?
A gradual decline in traffic after a website redesign can be an indicator of a more complicated problem. When you notice this kind of trend in your organic website traffic, look at your organic keyword rankings and see if the decline is consistent with any drops in your positions in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
This is the most common cause of gradual declines in organic traffic — a notable drop in search positions, and therefore a decrease in site visits from search engines. The cause of those position drops needs to be diagnosed to better understand why they occurred.
There are a few common possibilities for a gradual drop in organic traffic after a web redesign:
Site architecture changes
Site architecture plays a key role in SEO, and search engines use it to determine the importance or value of a page within your website. For example, when a page is linked to from the navigation menu, it receives greater importance than pages that are three or four clicks away from the homepage.
Making big changes to your site architecture without first evaluating the value of the structure you had in place can affect SEO performance over time.
Key architecture changes as part of a website redesign that can impact SEO performance include:
- Changing or removing links in the main navigation menu. This may mean you see a bigger or sudden change over a short period of time.
- Removing many old pages that had a lot of internal links pointing to key pages.
- Introducing new templates that didn’t carry over internal links from the old version.
If you know that a new navigation menu or fresh page templates were introduced as part of your website redesign, it’s worth reviewing an old version of your website through your backup or Wayback Machine. See if you can identify changes in the site architecture and if the pages experiencing the biggest position or traffic declines align with links being changed or removed.
Major content changes
Did you create new templates for the website redesign? And was the copy on those pages changed to fit the new layout? If so, this could be to blame for your drop in site traffic.
Content quality is generally the most important part of SEO success. If you had pages that performed really well before the redesign but have since seen a slump in traffic and a decline in rankings, you should check whether the copy and content were changed.
Notable copy changes can include:
- Whole sections of content being deleted or moved elsewhere.
- Completely rewritten pages to accommodate the new layout or design.
- Moving content from plain to tabbed content, or other hidden content areas.
Even if you believe you copied all the content over like-for-like from your old website designs, it’s worth checking whether your new designs have impacted certain on-page SEO elements like heading structures, title tags, or internal links.
Site performance impact
As web technology evolves and advances every year, it’s no wonder site owners want to take advantage of modern design elements to impress users visiting their pages. However, when site speed isn’t considered, it can introduce load-time issues when complex design elements are launched. This can affect SEO performance.
For example, if JavaScript has been a heavy part of the new website design and you have lots of new, dynamic functionality throughout the site, this could impact performance. JavaScript is an expensive resource as it must be downloaded, parsed, and executed during the page load process. It’s worth talking to your developer to better understand how heavy the new design is compared to the old one.
Don’t panic if you find this is the case. There are steps you can take to serve your JavaScript in a search-engine-friendly way. Read our complete guide on JavaScript for SEO to learn how to deal with this kind of site performance impact.
How to know if site performance impacts SEO
Having a backup of your original website is helpful for comparing the old site design with the new one. Using Google PageSpeed Insights, run the same page through the analyser to compare your before and after scores.
This should give you a good indication as to whether page speed issues were introduced in your new designs. It’ll also give you a diagnostic breakdown of the issues to help you rectify them.
How to redesign a website without losing SEO and traffic
There are many website redesign SEO considerations you should make during the planning stage to avoid a serious drop in traffic. SEO must be factored in from the start of a website redesign project to prevent a dip and work towards traffic, leads, and conversions increasing rather than decreasing.
Use this website redesign SEO checklist to ensure you make the appropriate considerations before launching your new site:
- Conduct an SEO audit – identify pages with high traffic and keyword rankings pre-redesign, so you can see their impact. Use this data as a benchmark to compare and identify any traffic drops or increases.
- Protect strong content – for pages with high traffic, make minimal changes to the content. Ensure headers remain properly tagged, internal links are in place, and the copy remains relevant and high-quality.
- Implement 301 redirects – identify pages with lots of backlinks and redirect to relevant pages if they’ll be removed to preserve the authority you get from them. Map out and test all 301 redirects before launch.
- Optimise page load speed – ensure images are the appropriate sizes, pages are mobile-friendly, and the page load speed is fast before launch.
- Check robots.txt – make sure the new site isn’t blocked from indexing (but the staging site is).
- Test the staging site – use the staging site to check all links, URLs, images, content, header and title tags, and all other SEO elements are in place and working before putting the new redesigned site live.
- Submit your new XML sitemap – immediately after your redesign launches, submit your new XML sitemap to Google and other directories to speed up the crawling and indexing. This can minimise traffic drops and their duration.
SEO and website redesign: FAQs
What are some common website redesign SEO mistakes?
There are various common website redesign SEO mistakes that you should avoid, as they may lead to a loss of traffic:
- Not using a staging site to update and test the website redesign
- 404 errors due to improper mapping of old URLs
- Accidentally blocking search engines with no index tags
- Slow page loading with large images and heavy JavaScript
- Removing content that ranks highly and drives traffic
- De-optimising content by removing heading tags and meta titles
- Launching with broken internal links.
Does changing a website URL affect SEO performance?
Changing a URL as part of a website migration or redesign can significantly affect SEO performance. Search engines treat new URLs as new pages, so they have to recrawl and reindex the site. This can cause a temporary drop in keyword rankings and organic traffic.
Avoiding common mistakes and ensuring you update internal links, redirects, and submit a new sitemap helps minimise any negative SEO impact from changing a URL.
Could changing a WordPress theme impact SEO?
Switching to a new WordPress theme can impact SEO performance, both positively and negatively, depending on the theme’s quality. Changing to a well-coded WordPress theme can improve page loading speed, structure, and mobile optimisation, which improves its SEO performance.
However, using a poorer quality WordPress theme may slow your site, remove heading tags and affect content structure, and cause broken links and navigation. It may negatively impact core web vitals, leading to a loss in rankings, traffic, and conversions.
What external factors could cause an organic traffic drop?
Sometimes an organic traffic drop could be out of your control and down to external factors such as:
- Google algorithm updates that prioritise competitor pages
- Greater AI use by your target audience that keeps them off your site
- Increased competitor activity, visibility, and performance.
Redesign your website without losing SEO value
Maintaining and ideally improving SEO value is vital for any website redesign. At SALT, our technical SEO services and expertise can help your business from the initial planning stages before a redesign, including auditing and advice, to post-website redesign checks, monitoring, and performance reviews.
If you’ve already moved over to a new site but traffic hasn’t recovered, we can also assist in finding the cause and applying appropriate fixes. Get in touch to discuss your site redesign plans and prevent common SEO mistakes.
