The call usually comes about six weeks after launch. The new site looks great. Everyone was pleased. Then someone notices the enquiries have thinned out, opens the analytics and sees a cliff on the day the site went live.
I’ve had this call more times than I’d like, and what bothers me is how avoidable it is. Nothing went wrong that a two-page checklist wouldn’t have caught. It simply wasn’t anyone’s job.
A redesign is a migration, whether you call it one or not
To a designer, a new site is a new look. To a search engine, it is a set of addresses it has known for years suddenly disappearing, and a set of strangers appearing in their place.
Every page on the old site had history: links pointing at it, rankings it had earned, people who had bookmarked it. If the old address doesn’t forward to the right new one, that history is thrown away. The search engine doesn’t know your new “Services” page is the old “What we do” page unless you tell it, page by page.
How the traffic gets lost
The same handful of causes, over and over:
- No redirects, or lazy ones. Every old address sent to the homepage, which search engines treat as a missing page.
- Good pages deleted. Someone decided the site had “too much content” and removed the pages that were bringing in most of the visitors, without checking which ones those were.
- Copy rewritten for tone alone. The words people actually search for were edited out because they didn’t sound on-brand.
- The test site’s “do not index” setting left on. The site launches while still telling search engines to stay away. It happens more than anyone admits.
- Tracking not carried across. So for the first month nobody can even see the problem, and the forms may not be recording at all.
- A slower site. Larger images, heavier scripts and animation that looks lovely and loads late.
Why nobody catches it
Because the project is judged on how it looks and whether it launched on time. The design agency is not usually asked to protect search performance, so it isn’t in the scope or the price. The SEO supplier, if there is one, hears about the launch a week beforehand. The client assumes that a professional build includes this. It is a gap between three reasonable assumptions.
What I’d do, before anything is designed
- Record what you have. Every address on the current site, with its traffic, rankings, enquiries and inbound links. That is the asset register.
- Decide what every page becomes. Kept, merged or retired, each with a new address to forward to. No exceptions and no “we’ll sort it after launch”.
- Protect the pages that earn. The top pages keep their subject, their key wording and their place in the menu, whatever the new design does.
- Build the tracking into the new site, tested before launch, so day one has data.
- Check on launch day. Redirects working, the site open to search engines, forms recording, speed acceptable.
- Watch for six weeks and fix what slips. Something always does.
If it has already happened
It is usually recoverable, and faster than people fear, if the old addresses are known and the redirects go in promptly. The longer it is left, the more of that history is gone for good.
A new website is one of the bigger marketing investments a business makes. It shouldn’t begin by handing back what the old one had spent years earning.