By Gecko Studio · updated October 2026
"We redesigned it six months ago and traffic has dropped by 40%."
That email reached us this spring. The new website is usually better than the old one: faster, nicer, easier to update. And yet the visits coming from Google have fallen and nobody can say why, because nothing looks broken on the site.
What is visible is almost never what is broken. What usually fails is what was there before and no longer is. This article is about how to find it, in what order, and what can be recovered.
First, check the drop really comes from the redesign
Before looking for culprits in the new site, rule out three things that look very much like a redesign drop.
The date. In Google Search Console, find the day the site launched and compare the four weeks before with the four weeks after. If the decline began a month before launch, or two months after, the redesign is probably not to blame.
Google. Several times a year Google changes how it ranks results, and some sites lose visits without having touched anything. If your drop coincides with one of those updates, the diagnosis is different; we cover it in what to do if your traffic has not come back after a core update.
The measurement. If the figure for the drop comes from Google Analytics, check that the new site carries the tracking tag and that it fires on every page. A new site without the tag properly installed shows a drop that does not exist. Search Console does not depend on that tag, so if clicks fall there as well, the drop is real.
And compare like with like on seasonality: if you sell in summer, September against August will always look bad.
Find the pages that used to bring visits
This is almost always where the answer is. A website ranks page by page, and what gets lost in a redesign is specific pages that brought visits and that, on the new site, have changed address, disappeared or lost the text for which Google showed them.
The new site cannot give you the useful list of those pages, because they are no longer there. Search Console does: in the performance report, Pages tab, covering the twelve months before launch. Export the list and sort it by clicks.
Do not rely for this on a tool that crawls your site. A crawl walks the site by following its links, so it only finds what is linked. The old page that was left out of the migration and that nothing links to any more appears in no crawl, and it is exactly the one that lost the visits.
We measured this month across the sites we manage, our own included. We cross-checked the 17,080 pages that had appeared in Google during the last year against what our crawl saw: more than one in four (27.6%) appeared in none. The crawl saw 17 broken pages across all the sites put together. The real number was much higher.
Request each old page and see what it returns
With the Search Console list, open the old addresses one by one, starting with those that brought the most clicks. Each can be in one of five cases:
- It is still at the same address with its content. Fine. If it has dropped in ranking, check whether the new text says less than the old.
- It redirects to the equivalent page on the new site. Fine. It is what should happen to every page whose address changed.
- It redirects to the homepage or a general listing. It is lost. Google does not care that no error appears: the page that ranked for a specific search no longer exists, and the homepage does not answer that search.
- It returns an error (page not found). It is lost, and it is the easiest to fix if done early.
- It returns a notice that it was deliberately removed. If that was a decision, it is fine.
That last case matters more than it seems. When we counted the "broken" pages on our own website, 356 came up, and 332 were pages we had removed on purpose. A tool that counts them all together tells you your migration is wrecked when what you have is a decision already taken.
To get an idea of the mix: of the pages on our sites that appeared in no crawl, when we requested a sample of 214 one by one, 44% were still working, 49% redirected elsewhere and 6.5% returned an error. A page not showing up in a crawl tells you neither that it is fine nor that it is broken. You have to request it.
The causes we find most often
Addresses that changed without a redirect
The classic case: the service page was at one address and on the new site it is at a similar one, but nobody set up the jump from old to new. Google keeps sending people to the old one, which returns an error, and over time stops showing it.
Redirects that all lead to the homepage
When there are many old pages, it is sometimes "solved" by sending them all to the homepage so they do not return errors. No error appears, but nothing is preserved either.
Content removed because it did not fit
Long texts trimmed so the design can breathe, FAQs deleted, service pages merged into one. If Google showed that page because of what the text said, removing it takes away the reason to show it.
Structure changes nobody checked
On a client's online shop, the English-language categories changed address twice in two months. The intermediate address contained a typo that nobody spotted in all that time, because an address with a typo works just as well as a correct one. When we started looking, it seemed those categories had collapsed. Half of the drop was an illusion: the visits were under the other address. The other half was real: among other things, each change of address forced Google to start over with those pages, which went from around 118 daily impressions in Google in June to 14 in August. We tell the whole story in new website or SEO first.
One language sent to another
If your site has several languages and an English page has disappeared, redirecting it to its Spanish version fixes nothing: the person searching in English still has no page. It has to be rebuilt or redirected to another English page.
The new site is blocked for Google
While it is being built, the new site is usually hidden from search engines. Sometimes that block stays on at launch. It is one of the first things to rule out if the drop is sudden and across the whole site.
Not everything that shows red is costing you visits
Website review tools flag many errors, and not all of them matter. On one client's site, our own crawl flagged 907 pages as broken and 816 were not: the server was throttling our requests because too many arrived at once. Had we sent that report on, the client would have thought they had lost half the site.
Before you start fixing, ask of each error whether anyone reaches that page: whether Google knows it, whether any of your pages links to it, whether any outside site links to it. An error on a page nobody requests costs you nothing.
What can be recovered
If the problem is addresses that changed without a redirect and it is fixed early, a good part of the visits usually comes back. Google passes through those pages again, sees where they go now and transfers what they had. The longer they spend returning errors, the harder it gets, because Google gradually forgets them and the links other sites had to them are lost.
If the problem is content that was removed, redirecting is not enough: you have to put that content back on the new site, in its new design.
And if the redesign changed many things at once (addresses, texts, structure and languages), do not expect everything to return, or to return all at once. The sensible approach is to rank the lost pages by what they brought in and start from the top.
If you have not launched the new site yet
Then you still have time to spare yourself all of the above. When we moved our own website to a new system, we reviewed the 781 addresses it had before touching anything, and on launch day rankings held. We explain it in what is a website audit and why it comes first, and the order in which to do things is covered in new website or SEO first. And if you are thinking of rebuilding your site, see our web design page for before-and-after examples of real projects.
If you would like us to look into it
If your website lost visits after a redesign, tell us via contact when the new site launched and whether you have Search Console. With Search Console access, our SEO audit produces the list of pages that were lost, what each one returns today and the order in which to recover them.
