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
-
Site dropped in search for 95% after 18-19 feb
Hi people. I have a client which holds a escort agency website operating in Amsterdam the Netherlands. Please take note that Escort Agency is legal and holland is a liberal country with permit and all, so just trying to point out that it's a perfectly legal crafted business. To the point: we are seeing a 95% drop in traffic (basicly back to barely 10 clicks a day) after 18 to 19 feb. We've inspected the incoming links, and we did see some things going on that where not quite healthy. At first a banner was bought on a dutch advertising website. On their behalf, this sitewide banner got published with a follow on roughly 132k of pages. That was strike 1 (i think). After tossing this in disavow for temporarily basis and informed the advertisal website to put any sitewide link to nofollow in the first place, nothing changed. We found a 2nd site doing the same mistake. Frankly the banner got exposed on roughly 100k of pages on which some of 'm where barely 2 days old. Strike 2. Solved this by putting it in disavow for the time being and asking politely to put the banner again, nofollow. We cleaned out any incoming potential spammy links by using disavow. The data we obtained was a mix of google webmaster itself and moz profiling. However we're one month further now, and the graph is still a big phat flatline. What is going on? I've noted that, one other sites, which share the same brand, but completely different websites / subnets / content and all, has the same threatment going on showing a huge drop from 18th of feb 2019 and is unable to recover. We cannot see anything 'bad' actually going on @ webmasters and there is no manual action taken. So we're kind of stuck now on a site that was my project but now completely fell into oblivion and hurting someone's business. The url is https://www.qualityescort.nl/ - anyone has a reasonable advice to this issue? full.jpg full.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jvanderlinde0 -
Is it a good strategy to link older content that was timely at one point to newer content that we would prefer to guide traffic and value to
Hi All, I've been working for a website/publisher that produces good content and has been around for a long time but has recently been burdened by a high level of repetitious production, and a high volume in general with pages that don't gather as much traffic as desired. One such fear of mine is that every piece published doesn't have any links pointing to when it is published outside of the homepage or syndicated referrals. They do however have a lot (perhaps too many) outbound internal links away from it. Would it be a good practice, especially for new content that has a longer shelf life, to go back to older content and place links pointing to the new one? I would hope this would boost traffic via internal recircultion and Page Authority, with the added benefits of anchor text boosts.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ajranzato91 -
How to avoid adult traffic to site?
A client of ours is increasingly getting a lot of adult traffic to their site, where they show up only for adult searches and not at all for relevant searches. How can we stop Google associating their site with adult content? Here's a blog example, giving advice to parents on girls and body image issues: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/blog/girls-and-body-image keywords driving traffic to this page are all around images for 'young nude girls' etc.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MediaCause0 -
Traffic has not recovered from https switch a year ago.
I have an ecommerce site that was switched to https a year ago almost to the day. Our category pages are about half of what they were. The redirects were put in properly, and everything in webmaster tools looks good. Anything out there I may not have thought of? Want to add that the drop is only in Google, Bing stayed just fine.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Site redesign..have I done everything?
Hello, We have a site that was recently put through the redesign process-a couple of weeks ago. It was a tired site that was optimized well, but still struggled because it was so outdated. I went ahead and re-optimized, submitted a new sitemap, and did the fetch. Have I missed a step? Could someone offer insight into what they do when a site is redesigned and the steps taken to make sure that Google crawls and "appreciates" 🙂 the new site as soon as possible? Thanks in advance for any and all help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lfrazer0 -
Huge drop in rankings for specialist life insurance site
I work with a site who specialise in life insurance for people with pre-existing medical conditions - http://goo.gl/Drwre6. The site has ranked really well historically, but was hit hard on 16th June when we saw an almost 100% drop in rankings overnight. We picked up on quite a few issues straight away and rectified these. A list of steps we've taken so far are below: removed CSS & JS files from robots.txt changed hosting provider back, as it had recently been moved somewhere new updated copy on main landing pages to remove small amounts that were duplicated requested removal of some suspicious looking backlinks and submitted a disavow found and removed a test site that was live and indexable found an external site that had scraped copy from our site - requested removal (this site is no longer live) cleaned up any 404 and ensured all redirects are working correctly updated the diabetes page to include more valuable info - including linking out to authority sites After taking all these steps, we have still seen no improvement. It could be that Google just hasn't yet re-crawled the site to take the changes into account...? We're aware of one other site in our industry that has noticed a drop in rankings in the last couple of months, but a number of our competitors are still ranking well for our target terms. We wonder if the site was caught up in the Payday Loans update, as the timings almost line up. Other sites with spammy medical content seem to have been hit, so we wonder if the "medical" type content on our site could have been penalised? Incredibly frustrating if so, as it's a valid, genuine service being offered! Really at a bit of a loss as to what to do next, so any help would be hugely appreciated! Katie
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Digirank0 -
Best way to handle traffic from links brought in from old domain.
I've seen many versions of answers to this question both in the forum, and throughout the internet... However, none of them seem to specifically address this particular situation. Here goes: I work for a company that has a website (www.example.com) but has also operated under a few different names in the past. I discovered that a friend of the company was still holding onto one of the domains that belonged to one of the older versions of the company (www.asample.com) and he was kind enough to transfer it into our account. My first reaction was to simply 301 redirect the older to the newer. After I did this, I discovered that there were still quite a few active and very relevant links to that domain, upon reporting this to the company owners they were suddenly concerned that a customer may feel misdirected by clicking www.asample.com and having www.example.com pop up. So I constructed a single page on the old domain that explained that www.asample.com was now called www.example.com and provided a link. We recently did a little house cleaning and moved all of our online holdings "under one roof" so to speak, and when the rep was going over things with the owners began to exclaim that this was a horrible idea, and that domain should instead be linked to it's own hosting account, and wordpress (or some other CMS) should be installed, and a few pages of content about the companies/subject should be posted. So the question: Which one of these is the most beneficial to the site and the business that are currently operating (www.example.com?) I don't see a real problem with any of these answers, but I do see a potentially un-needed expense in the third solution if a simple 301 will bring about the most value. Anyone else dealt with a situation like this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | modulusman0 -
My homepage dropped off of Google today? Any ideas?
My site, www.leaffilter.com, previously ranked #1 for searches of "leaffilter" and "leaf filter". Today the #1 ranking for "leaffilter" with Google is gone. Well, it's not gone on all internet connection. At home the #1 ranking is in place. At the office computer it is not anywhere near page 1. I'm testing searches logged in, not logged in, cache and cookies cleared, different browsers. Other, secondary pages, are appearing on page 1. It looks as if the homepage is just no longer indexed...but not on all internet connection. Any ideas what is happening? Does anyone have any troubleshooting tips?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LF_digital0