A new site and an empty inbox
The new website looks far better than the old one. Everyone was pleased at launch. Then enquiries slowed. Someone opened Google Search Console and saw clicks falling off a ledge on the day the new site went live. Pages that used to appear for your main services are gone.
The agency says rankings fluctuate after a relaunch and to give it time. Sometimes that is true. Often it is not, and waiting just loses more time.
What usually went wrong
| Mistake | Effect |
|---|---|
| Old URLs not redirected | Every link and ranking pointing at the old address hits a 404 error |
| Pages that ranked were merged or deleted | The content Google rewarded no longer exists |
| Copy shortened for design | The page no longer answers what searchers asked |
| Noindex or robots block left from development | Google is told not to show the site |
| Titles and headings changed wholesale | Pages stop matching the searches they used to win |
| Internal links reorganised | Important pages are now buried several clicks deep |
The root cause is almost always that the redesign was treated as a design project and nobody owned search. The old site's rankings were an asset nobody listed before throwing it away.
What the drop is costing
It also damages trust inside the business. Once a relaunch has gone badly, people become wary of changing the website at all, which leaves the next improvement waiting too.
Organic search is often the largest free source of enquiries for a business site. When it falls away, the gap is filled by paid ads, or it simply is not filled. Every week the broken URLs stay broken, links from other sites point at error pages and Google gets more confident that the old pages have gone for good.
How we repair a redesign that lost rankings
- Reconstruct the old site. We gather every old URL from Search Console, analytics, backlink data, archived copies of the site and old sitemaps.
- Check each old URL against the new site and list which ones now error, redirect badly or land on an unrelated page.
- Put permanent 301 redirects in place from each old URL to the closest matching new page, one to one wherever possible, not everything to the homepage.
- Compare the content. Where a page that ranked has lost the text, headings or answers that earned its position, we restore them into the new design.
- Audit technical settings: robots rules, noindex tags, canonical tags, sitemaps, and any leftover links to the staging site.
- Resubmit sitemaps, request reindexing of the key pages, and track clicks and impressions for the affected searches each week.
We tell you plainly which parts are fixable. Redirects and restored content usually help. If the new site dropped a service you used to rank for, the answer may be to create a page for it again.
After the repair
Old links land on the right pages again. The pages that ranked have their substance back inside the new design, so you keep the look you paid for. You have a written list of redirects and a before and after view in Search Console, and the next time the site changes someone will know what to protect.
Does this match what you are seeing?
- Search Console clicks fell sharply on or just after launch day
- Old page addresses now show an error page
- The new site has fewer pages than the old one
- Service pages were shortened to suit the new design
- Nobody made a redirect list before going live
- You were told to just wait for it to settle