The new website launches on Monday. It is faster, looks better and finally works on phones. By the end of the month, visitors from Google have dropped sharply and the phone rings less. Nothing is broken in the obvious sense. Every page loads. The problem is that Google had spent years learning what the old pages were about and where they lived, and the relaunch threw that away in one afternoon.

The short answer#

Search traffic drops after a relaunch when old URLs stop working, when pages that ranked lose the text that made them rank, when titles and descriptions are rewritten carelessly, or when the new site is blocked from indexing by mistake. To keep rankings, crawl the old site and export its best pages from Search Console before anything changes, map every old URL to its closest new page with a permanent 301 redirect, keep or improve the content of pages that bring traffic, carry over titles, headings and internal links deliberately, and check that the live site is indexable on launch day. Then watch Search Console daily for errors for several weeks. Google's own guidance for moves with URL changes is to keep those redirects for a long time, at least a year.

Why traffic drops#

URLs change without redirects

A page at /services/web-design/ becomes /what-we-do/websites. Anyone arriving from Google or from a link on another site gets a 404. Google eventually drops the old page from results and has no reason to rank the new one in its place.

Content that ranked disappears

A long service page is replaced by three short paragraphs and an animation. It looks cleaner and no longer answers the question people searched for.

Titles, headings and links are rewritten

Page titles, H1 headings and internal links tell Google what each page is about. A redesign that changes them everywhere at once changes the signals everywhere at once.

The new site is not indexable

The staging site was set to "noindex" or blocked in robots.txt, and that setting went live. Or the site renders its content only in the browser in a way crawlers struggle with.

Several changes at once

A new domain, new URL structure, new content and new design in the same week make it impossible to tell which change caused a drop.

The process#

Before the build

Crawl the old site to get a full list of URLs, titles, headings and status codes.
Export pages with clicks and impressions from Search Console for the last 12 months.
Export pages with links from other sites, from Search Console's links report or a backlink tool.
Mark the pages that matter: traffic, links, conversions. These are the pages whose content and URL decisions need the most care.

During the build

Keep URLs where you can. The cheapest redirect is the one you do not need.
For every URL that changes, decide its new equivalent. Map each page to the closest match, not everything to the homepage.
Keep the substance of pages that bring traffic. Improve them, but do not remove the text that answered the search.
Carry over titles and meta descriptions for important pages, changing them only with a reason.
Rebuild internal links to point at new URLs directly, not through redirects.
Keep structured data, hreflang for multilingual sites, and the XML sitemap.

On launch day

Deploy the redirect map and test a sample of old URLs, including the most visited and the most linked.
Confirm pages are indexable: no "noindex" left over, robots.txt allows crawling, canonical tags point to the new URLs.
Submit the new sitemap in Search Console.
Check analytics and consent tracking are installed.

After launch

Check Search Console daily for two weeks, then weekly, for 404 errors, redirect errors and pages excluded from the index.
Fix new 404s by adding redirects where a sensible target exists.
Compare traffic for the important pages against the pre-launch export.
Leave redirects in place. Removing them after a few months loses the links that still point to the old URLs.

If traffic has already dropped#

Start with the old URL list. Find which old pages now return 404 and redirect them. Then compare the content and titles of the pages that lost the most traffic with their old versions, which you can often retrieve from the Wayback Machine if no backup exists. These two steps are the usual place to start.

Shops face the same risks with more pages and more at stake, as described in moving from WooCommerce to Shopify. Before a relaunch it is also a good moment to confirm your company owns the domain and accounts, using the website ownership checklist.

Nevo builds websites and relaunches existing ones. The website development page describes how a project is planned.

Rebuilding a website without losing Google traffic