It's a familiar scenario: the new site looks better, loads faster, is clearer, and within two weeks traffic collapses. The cause is rarely the design. It lies in how the change of addresses was handled.

Oversight 1: redirects

Every page on the old site has an address. Search engines know that address, it's cited in emails, saved in bookmarks, and sometimes linked from other sites. If the new version changes the addresses without saying where the old ones lead, all of that value disappears.

The rule is simple: a complete list of the old addresses, a match to the equivalent new page for each, and a permanent redirect. This work is tedious and non-negotiable. It is also the first thing sacrificed when the launch is rushed.

A forgotten redirect is a page that used to bring in customers and now returns an error.

Oversight 2: content deleted in the name of simplicity

Redesigns often come with a big clean-up: forty pages become eight, “to make things clearer.” But those detailed pages were answering specific searches. Delete them, and you delete the entry points.

Simplifying the navigation is a good idea. Deleting the content that brought visitors in is a bad one. The two are not linked: you can perfectly well keep detailed pages without showing them in the main menu.

Oversight 3: launching without checking

A staging site is often blocked from indexing while the work is in progress. Sometimes that block goes live along with everything else. The site then becomes invisible to search engines, sometimes for weeks, without any alert being triggered.

  • Check that the site allows indexing after launch.
  • Make sure every important page responds correctly, not just the homepage.
  • Submit the updated sitemap to search engines.
  • Monitor errors for the following four weeks: that's when everything shows up.

The right timeframe

A redesign should be judged over three months, not three days. A slight, temporary dip is normal: search engines need to revisit the whole site. A lasting drop beyond four weeks points to a technical problem, not an adjustment period.

Three deliverables to ask for before the switchover

Before launch, insist on three deliverables: the list of old addresses with their redirects, the list of deleted pages with the reasoning behind each, and an indexing check carried out after the switchover. These three documents prevent nearly all redesign accidents.

The new site doesn't have to start from zero. Unless you erase the path that led to the old one.