Agency to Recover SEO After a Bad Website Redesign
A website refresh is intended to improve things. An improved design, faster page loads, and a more positive experience for users. However, what occurs when you launch your new site and your traffic from Google disappears overnight?
We’ve seen this happen firsthand at Hog the Web.
One customer returned to us after a different company completely redesigned their website by substituting hundreds of relevant pages with only a 5-page brochure-type website. The organic traffic dropped from above 300 visitors per day to less than 10.
The positive aspect of this story was that we restored the traffic levels on the site to around 300 daily visitors through recovering lost content, restoring important URLs, and correcting underlying SEO issues.
If you’ve had a similar problem with your website, there may be no reason to start over. It’s best to find out why the problem occurred and then fix the things that matter.
Why Did Your Website Traffic Drop After a Redesign?
A dramatic decrease in traffic following a website redesign is typically due to a major change. This can include: losing pages, malfunctioning redirecting links, a decreased amount of content, and/or technical issues with the website’s settings that prevent Google from correctly indexing the site.
Some ranking fluctuations are normal. Google’s site migration guidance explains that search engines need time to crawl and process website changes.
But losing half your traffic, or nearly all of it, is a different story.
The first thing you should check is Google Search Console. You will be able to see if there was a change in the number of people who clicked on your website (organic clicks), how many times your website appeared in search results (impressions), and which of your pages performed the best before and after the redesign.
When previously successful pages disappear from the search engine results page (SERP), that is when the investigation begins.
What SEO Mistakes Can Ruin a Website Redesign?
Most serious redesign-related SEO problems come down to a handful of avoidable mistakes.
Valuable Pages Were Deleted
This is one of the biggest problems we’ve encountered.
A business might have dozens of service pages and helpful articles bringing in customers every month. During a redesign, those pages get removed because someone wants a simpler website.
Unfortunately, a cleaner design doesn’t replace the search visibility those pages earned.
URLs Changed Without Redirects
Changing a URL and not redirecting the previous URL will result in your visitors receiving a “404 Error.”
It can also disrupt the search signals associated with that page.
Google recommends using permanent redirects when content moves to a new URL.
Important Content Was Removed
Sometimes, the pages still exist, but most of their useful information is gone.
A detailed service page becomes two short paragraphs. Helpful answers disappear. Location-specific information gets removed.
The website might look better, but it no longer answers the questions people are searching for.
Technical Settings Were Overlooked
Incorrect canonical tags, accidental noindex settings, broken internal links, and outdated sitemaps can all cause trouble.
These issues aren’t always visible to website visitors, which is why a technical review matters.
How Did We Recover Traffic After a 97% Website Traffic Loss?
Our work with Imhoff shows how much damage a poorly planned redesign can cause, and why recovery is possible.
The business previously received more than 300 organic visits daily. After its website was reduced to five pages, traffic fell below 10 visits per day.
The problem wasn’t simply that Google stopped liking the website. Hundreds of useful pages and established URLs had disappeared.
We focused on getting back the lost assets instead of simply continuing to make additional modifications to the design.
This meant that we would have to create and upload new high-quality content, restore all of the broken links and SEO signals, and build a brand-new website while maintaining as much as possible of the previous success.
At some point, organic visits increased back to around 300 per day, which then led to increases in generating leads.
This is a helpful reminder that although your current website may look old, there are likely some very good SEO resources on it.
How Do We Diagnose SEO Problems After a Redesign?
Before changing anything, we want to understand exactly what happened.
We at Hog the Web integrate SEO analysis into our on-site WordPress development services. This enables us to find issues and repair them.
We typically examine several areas:
- Search Console data: Which pages and search queries lost traffic?
- Old versus new URLs: Were important pages deleted or moved?
- Website content: Did the redesign remove information that previously ranked?
- Technical SEO: Are redirects, canonicals, and indexing settings correct?
- Backlinks: Are other websites linking to pages that no longer exist?
- WordPress configuration: Did theme, plugin, or development changes introduce problems?
If the previous website isn’t backed up, we may use archived versions from the Wayback Machine to help identify missing content.
We also check whether the reported traffic loss is real. Occasionally, analytics tracking gets removed during a redesign, making the numbers look worse than they are.
Can Lost Google Rankings Be Restored?
Rankings may be able to be restored following a redesign. The success of restoring rankings will depend on the reason for the decline.
Restoring valuable pages that have been deleted can be helpful. If URLs changed, properly mapped redirects can reconnect old addresses with relevant replacement pages.
There may also be other possible fixes such as recovering lost data, fixing broken internal links, correcting incorrect use of canonical tags and/or removing inadvertent blocks on search engine indexing.
We don’t recommend reversing every change automatically.
Your new website may be faster, easier to navigate, and more successful at turning visitors into customers. If so, then the objective of this transition is to maintain these benefits while restoring the search engine optimization (SEO) benefits that were lost when you switched sites.
How Long Does SEO Recovery Take?
SEO recovery can take several weeks or several months. There’s no reliable way to promise an exact timeline.
A simple technical error may be fixed quickly. Recovering hundreds of deleted pages is more complicated.
Google still needs to recrawl the corrected website and reassess its content.
We assess our progress by reviewing changes to our number of indexed pages, search engine visibility, keyword rankings, organic traffic, and ultimately conversion of those visitors into leads.
The most essential step is to find out what caused the issue, then fix it, as opposed to immediately starting a new design process.
When Should You Hire an SEO Recovery Agency?
If your website’s visitor count decreased substantially following a design change and none of your team members know why, consider hiring professional assistance.
This is particularly true if you are using your site to generate leads, support multiple services, and/or have created a lot of great content over the years.
Some SEO agencies provide an audit and leave implementation to your developer. At Hog the Web, we handle both sides.
We’ve spent more than 10 years helping over 300 businesses with WordPress websites, SEO, and ongoing website support.
We understand that an established website isn’t something you can casually replace. It may contain years of work, valuable backlinks, and pages that bring customers to your business.
Get Help Recovering Your Website Traffic
A bad redesign doesn’t always mean your SEO is permanently lost. Sometimes, the most valuable parts of your old website simply need to be found, restored, and properly connected.
At Hog the Web, we help businesses identify what went wrong and make the WordPress and SEO fixes needed to move forward.
Lost traffic after a website redesign? Visit hogtheweb.com to discuss your website and find out what can be recovered.
