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
-
Huge Drop in Direct Traffic in G4
Our direct traffic dropped 50% in October. Is anyone else seeing a drop in direct traffic in October in G4? It hasn't shifted to another source or unassigned it's just gone. Has anyone else experienced this and what might be the reasons?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseninja1 -
Huge organic traffic drom after a perfect domain migration. What to do?
Hi, I already asked the question on different places. But so far nobody could help me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dennis1992038
Hope someone can help me out. If possible.
I migrated my website https://vihara.nl to https://meditatieinstituut.nl and lost about 80% traffic (see printscreens). It's over more than a month ago now and there is no sign of getting it back up. Maybe there is nothing to do and
1. I have to be patient and traffic comes back in a few months.
or
2. There is nothing to do and I've lost everything I've build up in the last years. Start over again to get the rankings back.
or maybe, maybe
3. I just forgot something that I still need to do to get the rankings back up. Or there is something I did not think of... This is done: The website is migrated 1 on 1. No changes in content, url, code, etc. Everything is exactly the same as on the previous domain. 301 redirects whole domain (via htaccess a bulk redirect). All the old pages, without exceptions, lead to the exact new page. The new domain is running from CDN (Cloudflare) with the same settings as the previous domain. SSL is installed in the exact same way. Domain migration set up in Search console (working). Uploaded new sitemap (working). Updated internal links. Changed the most important external links (where I could get contact after reaching out) In meanwhile received some new external links and also posted new content Anybody knows what to do? Or do I just have to be more patient and will it come back in a few months by itself? Looking forward to suggetions. Thanks! Gerjan Migratie-Meditatie-Instituut-2048x786.jpg verloop-sinds-de-start-2048x355.jpg0 -
Home page suddenly dropped from index!!
A client's home page, which has always done very well, has just dropped out of Google's index overnight!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caro-O
Webmaster tools does not show any problem. The page doesn't even show up if we Google the company name. The Robot.txt contains: Default Flywheel robots file User-agent: * Disallow: /calendar/action:posterboard/
Disallow: /events/action~posterboard/ The only unusual thing I'm aware of is some A/B testing of the page done with 'Optimizely' - it redirects visitors to a test page, but it's not a 'real' redirect in that redirect checker tools still see the page as a 200. Also, other pages that are being tested this way are not having the same problem. Other recent activity over the last few weeks/months includes linking to the page from some of our blog posts using the page topic as anchor text. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Caro0 -
Why is my Bing traffic dropping?
In the middle of September we launched a redesigned version of our site. The urls all stayed the same. Since site launch traffic in Google has steadily increased but Bing traffic has dropped by about 50%. Any ideas on what I should look at?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Researching search volume drop
I am seeing a pretty precipitous drop in search volume traffic (see link). My keyword rankings don't seem to have suffered too much over this period. In fact, my #1 keyword have actually increased slightly in this timeframe. Two questions... Is there some way to assess overall search volume across my tracked keywords (to see if this is just a case of overall searches dropping)? Is there a recommended plan of attack for investigating drops like this - beyond overall search volume, what other data might be important in identifying the cause of this. In short, I'm looking for some logic/structure for how I investigate this, using Moz tools and reports. Thanks. Mark omE1VPc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarkWill0 -
New Site (redesign) Launched Without 301 Redirects to New Pages - Too Late to Add Redirects?
We recently launched a redesign/redevelopment of a site but failed to put 301 redirects in place for the old URL's. It's been about 2 months. Is it too late to even bother worrying about it at this point? The site has seen a notable decrease in site traffic/visits, perhaps due to this issue. I assume that once the search engines get an error on a URL, it will remove it from displaying in search results after a period of time. I'm just not sure if they will try to re-crawl those old URLs at some point and if so, it may be worth it to have those 301 redirects in place. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandBuilder0 -
Page position dropped on Google
Hey Guys, My web designer has recommended this forum to use, the reason being: my google position has been dropped from page 1 to page 10 in the last week. The site is weloveschoolsigns.co.uk, but our main business site is textstyles.co.uk the school signs are a product of text styles. I have been told off my SEO company, that because I have changed the school logo to the text styles logo, Google have penalised me for it, and dropped us from page 1 for numerous keywords, to page 10 or more. They have also said that duplicate content within the school site http://www.weloveschoolsigns.co.uk/school-signs-made-easy/ has also a contributed to the drop in positions. (this content is not on the textstyles site) Lastly they said, that having the same telephone number is a definate no no. They said that I have been penalised, because google see the above as trying to monopolise on the market. I don’t know if all this is true, as the SEO is way above my head, but they have quoted me £1250 to repair all the errors, when the site only cost £750. They have also mentioned that because of the above changes, the main text styles site will also be punished. Any thoughts on this matter would be much appreciated as I don't know whether to pay them to crack on, or accept the new positions. Either way I'm very confused. Thanks Thomas
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TextStylesUK0 -
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