Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Drop in traffic after redesign
-
Is it common for a site to see slight traffic drops after a site redesign (containing cleaner code, more usability and basically just being more helpful for the end user)? A new site of ours went live last Wednesday and has experienced a drop in traffic.
If you have seen this in your own site, how did you recover? And how long did the recovery take?
-
Then I think you will see a recovery and possible improvement, but check through Paul's suggestions.
Peter
-
Yes, the drops were in organic search.
We kept the URLs the same as the previous version of the site to avoid any problems, and no existing content was removed.
-
That's a great detailed answer Paul!
Peter
-
Hi Gordian
I assume the traffic drops you are seeing are from organic search?
Often with a redesign there will be a change in the page URLs for the site. Did that happen with your site? If so, then you need to make sure that you set up redirection from the old URLs to your new URLs. This will be an important thing to address if this has been the case.
Other than that, there are sometimes bumps due to re-indexing of pages but if the content has remained unchanged then you shouldn't see much change and any change you do see should recover.
If the code is cleaner and the user experience better, then you should begin to see some improvements. The latter is that is likely to take longer because it will be based on things like reduced bounced rates feeding back to Google and thereby creating better results due to the perceived better user experience.
I hope that helps,
Peter -
It's not unusual at all to experience this kind of minor, temporary drop, Gordian. The search engines will need to re-index the changes in content and URLs created by your redesign, and this can easily take a week or two.
The critical thing is to be certain you have effective monitoring processes in place to make certain you catch any issues that the redesign might have created just a soon as they occur, so you can fix them before any long-term damage is done.
- Segment out your traffic to determine exactly what source or sources might have caused the drop. For example, your overall traffic may have dropped, but if you look at the source segments, it may turn out that your organic search traffic is consistent, but your site's referral traffic from Pinterest has dropped significantly. (I've had this exact situation with a client - a goof in the .htaccess file was breaking the Pinterest referrals)
- Use Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools to make certain you're catching any new 404 errors and getting them fixed ASAP
- Use Google Analytics to monitor your most valuable pages to make sure they're not seeing an unusual increase in bounce rate, or unexpected drop in time on page.
- Use Google and Bing Webmaster Tools to ensure your site is being fully crawled and watch for changes to how many pages are indexed. (You can use the "submit URL" tools in both to submit the most important pages of the site for re-crawl - can often speed up the process of getting the new URL structure recognized & indexed.)
- Watch for unhealthy increases in page load times for your most important pages via Google Analytics. (Note: you have to customize the Analytics code snippet to get it to include more than the default 10% of pageviews which is almost never enough for accurate analysis.)
- Use your Moz Analytics crawls to keep an eye out for unexpected ranking drops in your most important keywords. (GWT average rankings can also be used for this) Also watch for any increase in dupe content flagged in Moz Analytics
The idea is that yes - it's natural to see a small, temporary drop after a redesign. But you want to be certain that the drop isn't being caused by a correctable technical issue. Hence the need for close monitoring, even if assuming it's just temporarily due to new site design.
Hope that all makes sense?
Paul
P.S. Getting some new, quality, authoritative links to the newly designed pages can really help too. Social Media, especially Google+ can be really effective for this.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Huge Spike in Organic/Direct traffic from Mexico
So here's my situation: My company's website usually receives around 80 organic visits/month and 50 direct visits/month from Mexico. However, in July we saw a small uptick to around 170 for each and then in the last 7 days we are in the middle of a massive spike which has put us up to 1400 visits for organic and 820 visits for direct in August. The traffic spike continues as we are almost up to 500 visits just today! Things to know: The visitors are purchasing from our store, staying on our site, browsing around, basically acting like real traffic. I was unable to identify any new links, press, and we did not do any specific Mexico optimization (spanish keywords). We sell a ball and it is called The One World Futbol, but it's always been called a futbol before so nothing new here. our website is www.oneworldplayproject.com. Everyone coming organically is searching our name, not keywords. We updated our shopping cart a few days before the massive traffic spike and significantly lowered the cost to ship to Mexico. Our Latin America director went to Mexico to work there for a month a few days before the spike and sent out a bunch of emails, texts, phone calls, what's app notifications to his large network. From what I am told by others here he has a vast network throughout Mexico, Central America and South America. We have also seen large traffic increases in other Latin American countries during this same time period just nothing like Mexico. We just hired an awesome social media coordinator who is extremely focused and is implementing a kick-ass social strategy We launched a branding campaign called #MakeLifePlayFull with press releases and ad spend behind it. PHEW! That was a lot of info for you to digest. So on the surface this seems like great news. BUT I want to understand WHY this is happening. Could it really just be the combination of all these things listed above or is it just a combination of our connected guy being in Mexico with better shipping costs? Why is it mainly happening in Mexico? Why is it so sustained? I suspect that if it is from our guy it would drop off quickly. Any thoughts on what to look at? I'm stumped.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_OWPP0 -
New Site (redesign) Launched Without 301 Redirects to New Pages - Too Late to Add Redirects?
We recently launched a redesign/redevelopment of a site but failed to put 301 redirects in place for the old URL's. It's been about 2 months. Is it too late to even bother worrying about it at this point? The site has seen a notable decrease in site traffic/visits, perhaps due to this issue. I assume that once the search engines get an error on a URL, it will remove it from displaying in search results after a period of time. I'm just not sure if they will try to re-crawl those old URLs at some point and if so, it may be worth it to have those 301 redirects in place. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandBuilder0 -
How to measure traffic for a keyword
Sitting in Country A I want to see how much traffic a particular keyword receives in Country B. Whats the best way to do it? Also, will the search results differ if I am analyzing the above sitting in Country A viz-a-viz Country B. In other words, will the IP of the country I am making the search from play a role in the results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KS__0 -
Organic search traffic dropped 40% - what am I missing?
Have a client (ecommerce site with 1,000+ pages) who recently switched to OpenCart from another cart. Their organic search traffic (from Google, Yahoo, and Bing) dropped roughly 40%. Unfortunately, we weren't involved with the site before, so we can only rely on the wayback machine to compare previous to present. I've checked all the common causes of traffic drops and so far I mostly know what's probably not causing the issue. Any suggestions? Some URLs are the same and the rest 301 redirect (note that many of the pages were 404 until a couple weeks after the switch when the client implemented more 301 redirects) They've got an XML sitemap and are well-indexed. The traffic drops hit pretty much across the site, they are not specific to a few pages. The traffic drops are not specific to any one country or language. Traffic drops hit mobile, tablet, and desktop I've done a full site crawl, only 1 404 page and no other significant issues. Site crawl didn't find any pages blocked by nofollow, no index, robots.txt Canonical URLs are good Site has about 20K pages indexed They have some bad backlinks, but I don't think it's backlink-related because Google, Yahoo, and Bing have all dropped. I'm comparing on-page optimization for select pages before and after, and not finding a lot of differences. It does appear that they implemented Schema.org when they launched the new site. Page load speed is good I feel there must be a pretty basic issue here for Google, Yahoo, and Bing to all drop off, but so far I haven't found it. What am I missing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdamThompson0 -
Can a large fluctuation of links cause traffic loss?
I've been asked to look at a site that has lost 70/80% if their search traffic. This happened suddenly around the 17th April. Traffic dropped off over a couple of days and then flat-lined over the next couple of weeks. The screenshot attached, shows the impressions/clicks reported in GWT. When I investigated I found: There had been no changes/updates to the site in question There were no messages in GWT indicating a manual penalty The number of pages indexed shows no significant change There are no particular trends in keywords/queries affected (they all were.) I did discover that ahrefs.com showed that a large number of links were reported lost on the 17th April. (17k links from 1 domain). These links reappeared around the 26th/27th April. But traffic shows no sign of any recovery. The links in question were from a single development server (that shouldn't have been indexed in the first place, but that's another matter.) Is it possible that these links were, maybe artificially, boosting the authority of the affected site? Has the sudden fluctuation in such a large number of links caused the site to trip an algorithmic penalty (penguin?) Without going into too much detail as I'm bound by client confidentiality - The affected site is really a large database and the links pointing to it are generated by a half dozen or so article based sister sites based on how the articles are tagged. The links point to dynamically generated content based on the url. The site does provide a useful/valuable service/purpose - it's not trying to "game the system" in order to rank. That doesn't mean to say that it hasn't been performing better in search than it should have been. This means that the affected site has ~900,000 links pointing to is that are the names of different "entities". Any thoughts/insights would be appreciated. I've expresses a pessimistic outlook to the client, but as you can imaging they are confused and concerned. LVSceCN.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DougRoberts0 -
Will redirecting poor traffic web pages increase web presence
A number of pages on my site have low traffic metrics. I intend to redirect poor performing pages to the most appropriate page with high traffic. Example
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/low-traffic-greyshoes
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/low-traffic-greenshoes
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/low-traffic-redshoes all of the above will be redirected to the following page:
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/high-traffic-blackshoes Question
Will carrying out htaccess redirects from the above example influence to web positioning of both www.sampledomomain.co.uk/high-traffic-blackshoes and www.sampledomomain.co.uk Regards Mark0 -
Why do I get India, Pakistan, Turkey traffic mostly?
Hi there, I've been wondering. Why do I get most of the traffic from these countries? My sites are english, I host in USA. I don't target a thing for those countries traffic, yet I get huge amounts of traffic from these countries. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | melbog0 -
New Website Launch - Traffic Way Down
We launched a new website in June. Traffic plummeted after the launch, we crept back up for a couple of months, but now we are flat, nowhere near our pre-launch traffic or previous year's traffic. For the past 6 months our analytics have been worrying us - Overall traffic and new visitor traffic is down over 10%, bounce rate is up almost 35% since site launched, keywords aren't ranking where they used to, and of course, web sales are down. Is this supposed to happen when a new site is launched, and how long does a new this transition last? We have done all the technical audits, adding relevant content, we're at a loss. Any suggestions where to look next to improve traffic to pre-launch numbers?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WaySEO0