Your site went live a couple days ago, you log into your analytics program to see how well it’s doing, and are shocked at the dramatic drop that occurred in traffic from Google. Your heart starts racing and you begin to wonder, “why did my website traffic drop, wasn’t it supposed to make it better

Below you will find the most common reasons that your traffic declines

XML Sitemap

As URLs are changed on your site during a redesign, you’ll want to ensure that the XML sitemap has updated URLs that match the new ones. The XML sitemap module handles this for us on a Drupal site.

If you aren’t running Drupal, a plugin for your CMS may handle this, or you’ll need to generate a new sitemap using third party tools. Once this has been completed, you can log in to Google Search Console and resubmit your sitemap for indexing.

New Architecture

Site architecture refers to how the pages are organized and linked together to create the website. Google passes value from one page to the next through internal links, and based on where the pages are located in the organization (hierarchy) of the website, pages will receive more or less of this value.
Pages that are linked closer to important pages (usually the home page and category pages) receive more value than those that are 3-4 clicks from these important pages.

What happens when you change the how the pages on a website are organized?
Every page has a target topic that Google values it for and thus it ranks for. That topic requires a certain amount of value (link juice), or a certain score to compete with the other websites in the search results targeting that same topic.

When a website changes how it is organized (linked internally), it can cause some pages to have less internal links, or be linked to from pages that have less value to pass. The new organization causes pages to receive less value, which in turn lowers the score of the page, dropping them below the threshold needed to rank within the search results.

Google Analytics

If you forget to place your Google Analytics tracking code in your new site’s markup before launch, you can end up in the dark when it comes to traffic fluctuations. The Google Analytics module handles the placement of this tracking code on a Drupal website, and even provides a status warning on the Drupal status page if the tracking ID has not been configured yet.

Those who aren’t using Drupal should follow the instructions provided by Google Analytics to place the code snippet in their site’s markup, or use a plugin provided by their CMS of choice. With the Google Analytics tracking code in place, your organization can get a much better overview of how your site performs after the redesign launches. It’s much easier to track your successes or failures in your redesign if you were already running Google Analytics, but a relaunch is a great time to start using it too.

Copy Change

When we refer to copy changes, we are not talking about minor grammatical changes – but instead changes to the primary and secondary topics of a page, and wherein the copy these priority topics are referenced.

In many instances, when a website is redesigned, the copy of the website also gets a refresh. This is done to help align content with the new design, as well as focus content more on conversions.

What happens when you change the website copy?
Copy changes cause Google to re-evaluate the relevancy of the page for the targeted topic. If priority keywords are removed from the key areas (title tag, header tags, body copy, alt text), the relevancy score will drop, and thus, rankings and traffic will follow.

Note: This makes it imperative to understand which keywords and topics have the highest ROI and traffic potential so that you don’t inadvertently remove those from the copy – causing more harm than good.

URL Redirects

Broken redirects or missing redirects to new URLs are also a big problem on site redesigns. These typically happen due to changes in URL patterns or menu structures. The Redirect module in Drupal provides an interface to add redirects for your pages without any coding experience. Non-Drupal sites can use .htaccess files or redirect statements in their web server configuration to ensure that all URLs that are changing have proper 301 redirects.

Pages Were Deleted

The final reason that websites have a significant drop in traffic after a website redesign is due to a content gap being created.

This occurs when trying to optimize the user journey by removing pages from the user flow. When a website is restructured without understanding the impact of removing pages, gaps in content sets and topics are created. This gap causes previously earned rankings to disappear for the topics those pages were targeting, and traffic to drop.

Note: Much like copy changes, this just being an extreme version of that, this makes it imperative to understand which keywords and topics have the highest ROI and traffic potential so that you don’t inadvertently remove (or drastically reorganize) the pages targeting those keywords.

Are there any other reasons that you have seen for drastic drops in traffic from the search engines after a website redesign – other than the site blocked itself from Google.

Broken Links

Broken links are a huge problem during website redesigns. This could be a result of changes in the menu structure or in path structures for content types. Broken links mean that users and search engines can’t find the pages they’re looking for, which can really wreak havoc on your site traffic statistics.

To avoid broken links in Drupal, we can use the Link checker module, but there are also third party tools that can be used for non-Drupal sites. Google Search Console provides some additional tools to identify broken links and 404 pages too.

Meta Tags

We typically build sites with Drupal, so the Metatag module handles much of the meta tag configuration and display on the site. If you aren’t using Drupal though, there could be some changes to your front-end design that could affect your meta tags and confuse search engine spiders. You’ll need to make sure that all of your pages have meta tags and that there aren’t any duplicates.

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