My traffic and SEO plummeted after my website redesign! What should I do?

So you spent weeks or months (and a fair bit of money!) working with a designer to update your website. Now it's live, and even though everyone tells you how great it looks, your traffic has basically vanished. What happened, and how can you get it back?

Well the good news is there's basically only two things that could have gone wrong during the redesign, and both of them are fixable (sadly, with more time, effort, and probably money). This article will walk you through what probably happened and how to fix it, or at least how to tell your website developer to fix it.

Technical SEO problems and how to fix them

Technical SEO is the base of the SEO pyramid. Nothing you do at the writing or linking level will help you if your technical SEO has issues. If you're not familiar with the term technical SEO, it's a catch-all for a lot of website best practices designed to ensure your visitors have a good experience, and that each page is adequately described to give the both humans and computers that visit the page an idea of what it does.

Your first step to fix these issues is understanding what specific problems you have, and how bad they are. Here are two completely free tools you can use to help you out:

How to use Google Pagespeed to identify technical SEO issues

Google Pagespeed gives you reports on your website's performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO issues.  If your site has enough traffic and uses Google Analytics, you'll get real-time data on your site's performance. Even if not however you'll still get some really valuable insights, and even specific suggestions for how to fix common issues. Some issues, like re-sizing images to reduce their file size, or improving contrast ratio so you conform to accessibility guidelines, are relatively easy. Others might require you to bring the list back to your website developer to fix. Hopefully your contract has a warranty against defects that you can use to get them to correct the issues for free.

If you're the type of person who prefers video to help learn how to use a tool, this is a good one:

Using Google Search Console to fix broken links and restore your SEO

The other potentially huge reason your traffic dropped after a redesign is that a lot of website redesigns introduce new web page structure to your site. This can range from simple changes like having your contact form previously at /contact-us now live at /contact , or it might be something more significant like having all of your company news features re-organized in a content management system with dynamically-generated page names.

The issue is this. Search engines and other sites still have links to your old pages, so when someone clicks on an external link to your /contact-us page, it shows a 'Page Not Found' message. This is what's known in web development as a 404, after the status codes that were built in to the HTTP protocol that's the backbone of the web.

As an aside, it's worth memorizing a few of these codes and how they're used, or at least bookmarking a cheat sheet so that you can look them up with web developers and designers reference them. There are cheat sheets on the web based on dogs, cats, and Beyoncé - use whichever works best for you.

When someone does hit your /contact-us page, there's likely a helpful link to get them back to our home page, and from there they should be able to find the new Contact page through the fancy navigation on your freshly-launched website. But what if they wanted to read a blog post that used to live under /articles and now lives under /blog? Most people aren't going to work that hard to find what they're looking for, and this is why you're losing traffic.

To fix these, you're going to need to implement what's known as a permanent redirect, HTTP 301 (use your cheat sheet). This tells web browsers and search engines that the page that used to be at, for example, /contact-us, is now located at /contact . The best part is, web browsers will read that and automatically take the user to the correct, updated page, without them having to do anything to make it happen. You put the 301 permanent redirect at the old page and point it to the new one, and you're done. There's an appendix at the end of this article with links and instructions for how to set these up on all of the major web hosting providers.

Now for the hard part - if your site is large, or has a lot of SEO-optimized articles you've been dutifully generating and maintaining for years, this process can take a while since you need to add one entry for each page you need to redirect.

But we launched the new site already and the old one is gone! How do I know what the old links are?

This happens more often than you might think!Especially when the redesign is built by a new agency or freelancer, or when you switch web hosting providers as part of your redesign. Things you can do, in order of how likely they are to resolve the issue:

1. Make it your new website developer's problem. Even though it's not technically a problem with the work they delivered, if people can't find content on your new site that's a problem they should fix. There's a chance during their work they made a copy of your old site, or at least its structure, in preparation for building the new one. Reach out and ask them to create 301 Redirects (use those exact words) for your old pages.
2. Reach out to whoever built the previous version of the site. If your new developer can't (or won't) help, your next best bet is to try the old one. They might have a copy of the site somewhere, especially if you also hired them to do maintenance and update work. The downside here is they might have an outdated copy, but even a partial solution is better than none.
3. If all else fails, try the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The Internet Archive has been saving versions of billions of web pages for years in their Wayback Machine. And if your old website had an up-to-date sitemap, chances are pretty good that there's a copy on the Wayback Machine. What you'll want to do is go to their home page and search for your domain name followed by /sitemap.xml, for example, example.com/sitemap.xml Even a relatively new site like Orchestra has a sitemap indexed, so if your site has one, there's a good chance it's there too. If you're having trouble finding it, contact us so we can help.
   Once you have the sitemap, you're going to look for a bunch of things that say <loc>. Immediately after each one of those is a website part to a page on your old site, for example /contact-us.  It might also have your domain in there, like https://example.com/contact-us, but you only need the part after that first slash. What you need to do is go to your new website's admin section and find the place where they allow you to set up permanent redirects (again, there's an appendix to this article with instructions for most popular web platforms).

Wrapping up

If your business is like most, your website traffic is your lifeblood. It brings sales or sales leads, which brings revenue, and without that your business could get into trouble quickly. Losing traffic and search rankings due to a redesign is a pretty scary thing, but the good news is it's fixable. You'll need to be quick, and you should definitely lean on your website developer to help you fix this under their warranty (your contract does have a warranty, doesn't it?). If they can't or won't help, reach out to Orchestra. We're not website developers but we do know SEO and search rankings, and we can certainly help implement redirects., If needed we can also  make warm referrals to website developers we trust.

Links and instructions for setting up 301 redirects with web hosting platforms

Below are links to instructions for setting up 301 Redirects on major hosting platforms. If your site doesn't use one of these, or you think we missed one, we want to hear from you.

Implementing 301 Redirects in Webflow

This article from Webflow University covers implementing 301 Redirects. If you prefer video tutorials, there's one embedded in the article or you can watch it below.

Implementing 301 Redirects in Wordpress

Looking to implement 301 Redirects in Wordpress? This article does a great job walking you through that process. Prefer video? Use the one below.

Implementing 301 Redirects in Wix

Wix has an article dedicated to setting up 301 Redirects. Video folks, the best option is below.

Implementing 301 Redirects in Squarespace

Squarespace's help center has an article dedicated to 301 Redirects. There's also a 3-minute video if that works better for you:

Implementing 301 Redirects in Hubspot Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, or CMS Hub

The official guide for implementing 301 Redirects in Hubspot is here. If you prefer video tutorials, we recommend this one below.