Sauce · Technical
Your website redesign hurt your rankings. Here is why, and how to get them back
Quick answer
A new website can drop your Google rankings when it changes page addresses without redirects, keeps a “hide from Google” setting left on from the test site, blocks Google in a settings file, cuts pages or text, or loads much slower. Each one is a checkbox. Work down the list, fix what you find, and most sites recover in a few weeks.
Rankings down after a relaunch?Get a free 49-point scan to see exactly what slipped.
Get the free scanYou launched the new site on a Monday. It looks incredible. By the next week the phone was down a third.
The design is not the problem. The site is prettier, faster to read, easier on a phone. Your customers would like it, if Google still sent them.
A redesign touches the plumbing under the paint. When the plumbing changes and nobody checks the joints, the water goes somewhere you cannot see.
Here is the good news first. This is common, and it is almost always fixable. You are looking for a short list of specific breaks, not a mystery.
What a redesign quietly breaks
Seven things go wrong most often. Any one can pull your local rank down. Open each and check it against your site.
New sites often change the web address of every page. If the old addresses were not pointed to the matching new ones with permanent redirects, every link Google trusted now hits a dead end. This is the number one cause. The full fix is here: how to move a web page without losing the calls.
While a site is being built, the team sets it to hide from Google so the half-done version does not show up. On launch day, someone has to turn that off. When they forget, Google slowly drops every page. If your whole site vanished from search at once, check this first.
There is a small file called robots.txt that tells search engines where they may look. A test-site version of it can carry over and tell Google to stay out entirely. One wrong line, whole site blocked.
The old site had a page for each service and each town you cover. The new one has three tidy pages. Those cut pages were doing ranking work. If you drop them, redirect each one to the closest surviving page, and plan to rebuild the ones that mattered.
Designers love white space. Google reads words. If the new home page went from six paragraphs to one line and a photo, you removed the text that told Google what you do and where. Keep the clean look, put the substance back.
Big background videos, huge photos and heavy page builders can make a “modern” site crawl on a phone. Slow pages lose visitors and lose ground in search. Test it on a normal phone on cell data, not the office wifi.
The old menu linked every service page from the home page. The new menu hides them two clicks deep or drops them into a dropdown Google follows less. Pages that lost their easy links from the rest of the site lose strength.
Rushed relaunch vs safe relaunch
Same new design. The difference is the hour of checking that happens around the switch.
- Old and new page addresses were never written down side by side.
- Redirects were “handled later,” which means not at all.
- The hide-from-Google setting and test robots.txt shipped with the site.
- Nobody compared the new page count to the old one.
- Search Console was not checked again until calls dropped.
- Every old address is mapped to its closest new address before launch.
- Permanent redirects go live with the site, one hop each.
- The hide setting is turned off and robots.txt is checked on day one.
- Key pages and their text carry over, even in the new layout.
- Search Console gets the new sitemap and a check every few days after.
How to recover, in order
If the site is already live and rankings already slipped, do this in sequence. Most of it you or your web person can do in an afternoon.
Confirm Google is allowed in
Check the hide-from-Google setting is off and robots.txt is not blocking the site. In Search Console, look for a spike in “blocked” or “noindex” pages right after launch.
Find the dead old addresses
Pull your old page list from the old sitemap or a crawl. Test each one. Any that error out or dump you on the home page needs a redirect to its real match.
Add the missing redirects
Permanent, server-side, one hop straight to the final page. Match a service page to the new service page, not the home page. Follow the safe-move sequence.
Put back what got cut
Restore the text and the pages that were carrying rank. New layout is fine. The words and the service and area pages need to exist.
Fix speed and internal links
Compress the giant images, drop the autoplay video if it is heavy, and link your main service pages from the home page again.
Resubmit and watch
Send the new sitemap in Search Console. Check the Pages report weekly. Keep the redirects up for at least a year.
Go deeper
The three reads for a site change
Before, during and after a relaunch.
Not sure how far it slipped?The free 49-point scan maps your coverage now, so you can measure the recovery.
Get the free scanHow long until it comes back
Once the breaks are fixed, Google needs to re-visit your pages and re-learn the new addresses. That is not instant.
- Days to two weeks: the hide setting and robots.txt fixes. Pages start coming back into the index.
- Two to six weeks: redirects transfer their trust. Rankings climb back toward where they were.
- Six weeks and out: restored content and rebuilt pages earn their spots again. Bigger the site, longer the tail.
If nothing moves after a month of correct fixes, the drop may not be the redesign at all. It could be a Google update or a competitor's gain that landed in the same window. A grid scan tells you which.
Can a website redesign really hurt my Google ranking?
Yes, and it is common. A redesign that changes page addresses without redirects, ships with a leftover “hide from Google” setting, blocks crawlers in robots.txt, cuts pages, thins the text, or slows the site down can all lower rankings. The design itself is rarely the cause. The plumbing changes around it are.
How long does it take to recover rankings after a redesign?
With the breaks fixed correctly, expect days to two weeks for indexing issues to clear, two to six weeks for redirects to pass their signals, and longer for restored pages and content to rank again. Larger sites take longer. If nothing moves after a month, look for a separate cause like a Google update.
My whole site disappeared from Google after launch. What happened?
Almost always one of two things: the “discourage search engines” or noindex setting was left on from the staging site, or the robots.txt file is blocking the whole site. Both are quick checks and quick fixes in your site settings and Search Console.
Do I need to redirect every single old page?
Redirect every old address that had links, traffic, or rankings. Point each to the closest matching new page, not a blanket redirect to the home page. Pages with nothing pointing at them can be left to fall away, but when in doubt, redirect it.
Should I have kept the old website up?
You do not need the old site, but you do need its page list and its redirects. Export the old sitemap and a crawl before you take it down. Those two files are what let you map old addresses to new ones and catch anything that broke.
Sources
- Google Search Central, Redirects and Google Search: a permanent redirect (301, 308) is used as a canonicalization signal; a temporary redirect (302, 307) is not; server-side redirects are the most reliable and JavaScript redirects are a last resort. Read it
- Google Search Central, Site moves with URL changes: map each old URL to its new URL, redirect with server-side 301s, avoid redirect chains, restore or redirect removed pages, submit the new sitemap, and keep redirects live for at least a year. Read it
- Google Search Central, Block Search indexing with noindex: a
noindexrule or a robots.txt block removes pages from Google results; a staging configuration carried into production is a common cause of pages dropping out after a launch. Read it - Google Business Profile Help, Improve your local ranking on Google: local results are based on relevance, distance and prominence; prominence draws partly on information about a business from across the web, including links; there is no way to pay for a better local ranking. Read it
- Peer-reviewed: Nah, F. F.-H. (2004). “A study on tolerable waiting time: how long are Web users willing to wait?” Behaviour & Information Technology, 23(3), 153–163. Users abandon pages that load slowly, which is why a redesign that increases load time can cost both visitors and search position. Read it
Recovery timelines are directional and vary with site size, crawl rate and how cleanly the fixes are made.
Next step
See exactly what the relaunch cost you
The free scan checks your business against 49 points and maps your coverage today. Fix the breaks, run it again, and watch the difference.