Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Drop in traffic after redesign
-
Is it common for a site to see slight traffic drops after a site redesign (containing cleaner code, more usability and basically just being more helpful for the end user)? A new site of ours went live last Wednesday and has experienced a drop in traffic.
If you have seen this in your own site, how did you recover? And how long did the recovery take?
-
Then I think you will see a recovery and possible improvement, but check through Paul's suggestions.
Peter
-
Yes, the drops were in organic search.
We kept the URLs the same as the previous version of the site to avoid any problems, and no existing content was removed.
-
That's a great detailed answer Paul!
Peter
-
Hi Gordian
I assume the traffic drops you are seeing are from organic search?
Often with a redesign there will be a change in the page URLs for the site. Did that happen with your site? If so, then you need to make sure that you set up redirection from the old URLs to your new URLs. This will be an important thing to address if this has been the case.
Other than that, there are sometimes bumps due to re-indexing of pages but if the content has remained unchanged then you shouldn't see much change and any change you do see should recover.
If the code is cleaner and the user experience better, then you should begin to see some improvements. The latter is that is likely to take longer because it will be based on things like reduced bounced rates feeding back to Google and thereby creating better results due to the perceived better user experience.
I hope that helps,
Peter -
It's not unusual at all to experience this kind of minor, temporary drop, Gordian. The search engines will need to re-index the changes in content and URLs created by your redesign, and this can easily take a week or two.
The critical thing is to be certain you have effective monitoring processes in place to make certain you catch any issues that the redesign might have created just a soon as they occur, so you can fix them before any long-term damage is done.
- Segment out your traffic to determine exactly what source or sources might have caused the drop. For example, your overall traffic may have dropped, but if you look at the source segments, it may turn out that your organic search traffic is consistent, but your site's referral traffic from Pinterest has dropped significantly. (I've had this exact situation with a client - a goof in the .htaccess file was breaking the Pinterest referrals)
- Use Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools to make certain you're catching any new 404 errors and getting them fixed ASAP
- Use Google Analytics to monitor your most valuable pages to make sure they're not seeing an unusual increase in bounce rate, or unexpected drop in time on page.
- Use Google and Bing Webmaster Tools to ensure your site is being fully crawled and watch for changes to how many pages are indexed. (You can use the "submit URL" tools in both to submit the most important pages of the site for re-crawl - can often speed up the process of getting the new URL structure recognized & indexed.)
- Watch for unhealthy increases in page load times for your most important pages via Google Analytics. (Note: you have to customize the Analytics code snippet to get it to include more than the default 10% of pageviews which is almost never enough for accurate analysis.)
- Use your Moz Analytics crawls to keep an eye out for unexpected ranking drops in your most important keywords. (GWT average rankings can also be used for this) Also watch for any increase in dupe content flagged in Moz Analytics
The idea is that yes - it's natural to see a small, temporary drop after a redesign. But you want to be certain that the drop isn't being caused by a correctable technical issue. Hence the need for close monitoring, even if assuming it's just temporarily due to new site design.
Hope that all makes sense?
Paul
P.S. Getting some new, quality, authoritative links to the newly designed pages can really help too. Social Media, especially Google+ can be really effective for this.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Landing pages for paid traffic and the use of noindex vs canonical
A client of mine has a lot of differentiated landing pages with only a few changes on each, but with the same intent and goal as the generic version. The generic version of the landing page is included in navigation, sitemap and is indexed on Google. The purpose of the differentiated landing pages is to include the city and some minor changes in the text/imagery to best fit the Adwords text. Other than that, the intent and purpose of the pages are the same as the main / generic page. They are not to be indexed, nor am I trying to have hidden pages linking to the generic and indexed one (I'm not going the blackhat way). So – I want to avoid that the duplicate landing pages are being indexed (obviously), but I'm not sure if I should use noindex (nofollow as well?) or rel=canonical, since these landing pages are localized campaign versions of the generic page with more or less only paid traffic to them. I don't want to be accidentally penalized, but I still need the generic / main page to rank as high as possible... What would be your recommendation on this issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ostesmorbrod0 -
Huge Spike in Organic/Direct traffic from Mexico
So here's my situation: My company's website usually receives around 80 organic visits/month and 50 direct visits/month from Mexico. However, in July we saw a small uptick to around 170 for each and then in the last 7 days we are in the middle of a massive spike which has put us up to 1400 visits for organic and 820 visits for direct in August. The traffic spike continues as we are almost up to 500 visits just today! Things to know: The visitors are purchasing from our store, staying on our site, browsing around, basically acting like real traffic. I was unable to identify any new links, press, and we did not do any specific Mexico optimization (spanish keywords). We sell a ball and it is called The One World Futbol, but it's always been called a futbol before so nothing new here. our website is www.oneworldplayproject.com. Everyone coming organically is searching our name, not keywords. We updated our shopping cart a few days before the massive traffic spike and significantly lowered the cost to ship to Mexico. Our Latin America director went to Mexico to work there for a month a few days before the spike and sent out a bunch of emails, texts, phone calls, what's app notifications to his large network. From what I am told by others here he has a vast network throughout Mexico, Central America and South America. We have also seen large traffic increases in other Latin American countries during this same time period just nothing like Mexico. We just hired an awesome social media coordinator who is extremely focused and is implementing a kick-ass social strategy We launched a branding campaign called #MakeLifePlayFull with press releases and ad spend behind it. PHEW! That was a lot of info for you to digest. So on the surface this seems like great news. BUT I want to understand WHY this is happening. Could it really just be the combination of all these things listed above or is it just a combination of our connected guy being in Mexico with better shipping costs? Why is it mainly happening in Mexico? Why is it so sustained? I suspect that if it is from our guy it would drop off quickly. Any thoughts on what to look at? I'm stumped.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_OWPP0 -
How can I stop spam Google Organic traffic?
Hey Moz, I'm a rather experienced SEO who just encountered a problem I have never faced. I am hoping to get some advice or be pointed in the right direction. I just started work for a new client. Really great client and website. Nicer than most design/content. They will need some rel canonical work but that is not the issue here. The traffic looked great at first glance 131k visits in April. Google Analytics Acquisition Overview showed 94% of the traffic as organic. When I dug deeper and looked at the organic source I saw that Google was 99.9% of it. Normal enough. Then I looked at the time on site and my jaw dropped. 118,454 Organic New Users for Google only stayed on the site for 3 seconds. There is no way that the traffic is real. It does not match what Google Webmaster tools, Moz, and Ahrefs are telling me. How do I stop a service that is sending fake organic Google traffic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | placementLabs0 -
My Domain authority dropped 9 points... Does anyone have any suggestions to fix this significant drop.
My domain authority dropped by 9 points and I haven't done anything differently since the last scan. What is going on?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | infotrust20 -
Regular Expressions for Filtering BOT Traffic?
I've set up a filter to remove bot traffic from Analytics. I relied on regular expressions posted in an article that eliminates what appears to be most of them. However, there are other bots I would like to filter but I'm having a hard time determining the regular expressions for them. How do I determine what the regular expression is for additional bots so I can apply them to the filter? I read an Analytics "how to" but its over my head and I'm hoping for some "dumbed down" guidance. 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads1 -
New Website Launch - Traffic Way Down
We launched a new website in June. Traffic plummeted after the launch, we crept back up for a couple of months, but now we are flat, nowhere near our pre-launch traffic or previous year's traffic. For the past 6 months our analytics have been worrying us - Overall traffic and new visitor traffic is down over 10%, bounce rate is up almost 35% since site launched, keywords aren't ranking where they used to, and of course, web sales are down. Is this supposed to happen when a new site is launched, and how long does a new this transition last? We have done all the technical audits, adding relevant content, we're at a loss. Any suggestions where to look next to improve traffic to pre-launch numbers?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WaySEO0 -
Help! My Domain Authority keeps dropping! What do I do?
Hey! I just noticed my Domain Authority keeps dropping? What's happening? What do I do to get it better. I'm scared and dont know the next move to make to get this site better. Help please! Thanks! http://www.moondoggieinc.com Kristy O
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KristyO2 -
Sudden rank drop for 1 keyword
A page of mine (http://loginhelper.com/networks/facebook-login/) was ranking in the top 10 for keyword (facebook login) and has been for at least 2 months, moving between 5th and 10th. Suddenly in the last 3 days the rank for the keyword dropped from 7th to 46th, yet none of the other keywords have been affected (they target other pages) and their ranks have continued to improve. I am trying to figure out what caused this sudden drop in the ranking of 1 page (the page has quality mainly text based content and isn't in the least bit shallow or spammy) I have been thinking perhaps a crawl or server error may be to cause leaving the page temporarily unavailable or with a big load time... Otherwise what could cause one page to drop so much so quickly whilst other pages improved their rank?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Netboost0