The new site went live on Thursday. It's better in every way: faster, better looking, finally decent on mobile. Three weeks later, visits from Google have halved and nobody can work out why.
This happens often and is almost never bad luck. It's a short list of things left undone — things that cost little before launch and a lot afterwards.
Cause number one: the addresses changed and nobody said so
On the old site, a page lived at /services/consulting.html. On the new one it's at /services/consulting/. To you, it's the same page. To Google, it's two — and the old one, the one with years of history and links pointing to it, now returns an error.
The fix is called a permanent redirect, and it means saying "what used to be here has moved to there," address by address. It isn't optional, and it isn't a technical footnote: it's the difference between keeping what you built and starting from zero.
Here's how it's done: before switching off the old site, pull the list of every address that exists, and for each one, decide which new page it corresponds to. If there's no match, point it to the nearest section — never to the homepage as a blanket fix, which is the lazy shortcut Google treats as good as an error.
The other four
- It was left blocking search engines. During construction, the site was closed off to indexing — and on launch day nobody switched that back on. It's the easiest mistake to make and the easiest to check.
- Titles and descriptions got lost. The content was moved over by hand and every page's title ended up identical, or ended up with whatever a tool generated automatically.
- The text shrank. It got "tidied up" along the way, and the pages that used to bring in visits ended up with three sentences and one big photo.
- Tracking broke. The analytics code didn't carry over to the new site, and for a month nobody knew what was happening — which is particularly bad, because that's exactly the month you need to know.
What to do before switching off the old one
Four things, and all of them before, not after.
Keep what brings in visits. Pull the list of pages that got the most visits from Google over the last year. Those are the ones that need to survive the launch, either at the same address or with a redirect.
Keep what brings in links. If an outside site links to one of your pages, that page is worth more than it looks. Losing it means losing work that wasn't even yours.
Take a snapshot of the numbers. Visits, enquiries, rankings for the searches that matter. Without this, in a month's time you'll be arguing about impressions.
Leave the old site up for a few days. Don't delete anything until you're sure everything's responding correctly.
The week after
Submit the new sitemap in Google's tools and request indexing for the main pages. Then, every day for two weeks, check the error list: those are the redirects that got missed, and there's still time to fix them.
Expect some fluctuation in the first few weeks even with everything done right — Google takes a while to sort things out again. What isn't normal is the drop still being there after six or eight weeks. If so, something on the list is still unresolved.
If you've already launched and already dropped
Not everything is lost, and the order is the same. Recover the list of addresses from the old site — Google's tools still hold the history — do the redirects that are missing, and confirm nothing's blocking indexing.
Recovery usually takes a few weeks and rarely lands exactly back where it started, but most of it comes back. It's work that combines websites and web pages with SEO, and the sooner it's done, the less is lost.
Changing your website?
Tell us what you have today and what you want to change. We'll handle the launch with the redirects done and the numbers saved before switching off the old one.