If your website saw a drop in organic traffic after its last redesign, this article is going to help you to diagnose the issue and hopefully provide you some next steps to see about recovering that traffic.
Is a Traffic Drop Normal After a Redesign?
To start, is it normal to see a drop in traffic after a website redesign?
It’s common but entirely unnecessary.
The only time that this is going to happen is when the web developer really didn’t know what they were doing with the SEO of your website.
If you see a drop in organic traffic following a website redesign, it’s going to be because of one of three reasons.
First, the developer introduced some sort of technical SEO issue; I’ll get into that in a minute.
Second, the developer changed the content somehow.
Third, the design itself has some sort of UX problem that is either resulting in fewer people coming back to the website or just fewer people interacting well with the website, and Google seeing that and not really wanting to show your website as frequently to people that are searching on Google.
So, one by one, let’s go through these three categories of problems and the most common things that I’ve seen.
Category 1: Technical SEO Issues
By far, the most common issues are category number one: technical SEO issues.
To start off, see if the site architecture was changed in any way; this is by far the most common mistake that I see developers make.
First, check if the developer changed any of the actual URLs on your website.
If they did change the URLs, did they implement a 301 redirect?
If they did not, there’s a very good chance that your traffic is not going to recover over time.
I’ve seen this a whole bunch of times, so someone needs to get in there, find how to implement redirects from where the articles and pages used to be over to where they now are, and get that resolved as soon as possible.
Internal Linking and Site Structure
Next, see how the internal linking has been changed on your website, if at all.
Was this page that used to rank very well before in the top-level navigation and it no longer is?
Was it once linked in the footer and it no longer is?
Was it once linked to from the homepage and no longer is?
When it was linked to before anywhere, was the anchor text changed in that link from that page over to this page that has dropped in search traffic?
I’ve seen cases where before they were linking to a page like “Web Design Philadelphia” and they change that out for a “read more” button; that’s going to change the relevance of that page in the eyes of the search engine ever so slightly.
Now, depending on which of the issues that you’ve encountered while diagnosing this issue, the next steps are really to address them.
Either change back the URL structure to how it used to be or implement redirects.
Add back any internal links to the page that used to be there on the old website, be it on the homepage, other pages on the website, the footer, or the header.
See if the old website had breadcrumbs and this one does not.
Try to get all of the internal linking and the relationship of all of the pages to one another as similar to the previous website as you possibly can.
Category 2: Content Relevance
Once you’ve confirmed that there are no technical changes that have been made to your website that could be resulting in this drop in organic traffic, next we need to look at the content.
Another extremely common issue that I see with website redesigns that will affect your traffic, for better or for worse, are content changes.
Changing the content on your website will increase or decrease the relevance of that content to the searches that people are performing.
If you’ve decreased the relevance of the content on your website to the searches that people are performing, Google is going to show you further down in the search results, resulting in a drop in organic traffic.
First, you’re going to want to see how the title tags were changed on your website.
Take a look at the title tag on your website and compare it to the title tag that used to be on that same page.
A website’s title tag is often going to be reflected right in the search engine results.
Not only does it send an extremely powerful signal to Google about what that page is about, it also impacts whether people are going to click on you in the search results or not, which in turn could actually affect the position that you’re ranking in.
Check the headings on the page.
Were any of the headings changed?
Was any of the paragraph content changed on the website?
If you have a page where you made significant changes to the content and there’s been a subsequent drop in organic traffic, you’re probably going to need to revamp that content and possibly get it back to being a little bit more like what it used to be.
Google obviously doesn’t think as highly of it now as it did before.
Category 3: User Experience (UX) Changes
This leads us to the third common cause of organic traffic drops following a website redesign: user experience changes.
Your website’s traffic is affected by whether people actually like it or not.
It will impact whether people come back to your website for a second, third, or fourth visit, which will increase or decrease your organic traffic.
A poor design actually could result in people clicking on your result in the search results, landing on a page, not really loving what they’re finding, going back to the search results, and clicking on a competitor.
This is referred to in SEO as “pogo sticking.”
We’ve learned definitively that Google does use user signals—how people actually interact with your website in the search results and possibly even once they land on the website.
So, any sort of negative feedback loop that’s getting created by people landing on your website and then leaving right away and going to other people’s websites very well may result in a decrease in search rank.
The solution here is really going to be to see what it is about your website that could possibly be turning people off.
A design that is too cluttered, a blog article layout that is hard to read, bad imagery, bad stock photography, or an overall ugly layout—all of these things could result in people just simply not liking what they’re finding when they land there.
Analyzing the Data in Google Analytics 4
Google Analytics can give you some insights into whether this may be happening with your website.
So, you’re going to go into Google Analytics 4.
You’re going to go down to “Engagement,” click on “Pages and Screens,” and we’re going to set a comparison period.
If you click right here, we’re going to just pick the day that your website went live; let’s say it went live on the 17th and today’s the 27th.
We’re going to scroll down a little bit on the left-hand side and actually click on “Compare.”
This is going to allow us to compare our engagement on each one of these pages before and after the redesign.
You’re going to click on “Apply,” and then we’re going to scroll down.
You‘ll be able to see what pages have seen drops or increases in traffic since your website redesign.
If you see that you used to have articles that were getting a minute and 15 seconds and now they are getting an average view time of 35 seconds, you have a problem.
