Website redesigns that do not cost you your rankings
The traffic drop after a relaunch is not inevitable. It is the predictable result of four things nobody assigned to anyone.
/ In this article:
Rebuilds lose traffic for boring reasons. Every one of them is preventable, and every one of them is preventable only before launch.
The four causes
- URLs changed and nothing redirected.
- Content was "tightened" and the pages that ranked lost the text that ranked them.
- The new site is slower on mobile than the old one.
- Staging was indexed, or production was not.
Nobody sets out to delete their best page. They set out to simplify the navigation.
/ TITANMATTER
What to do before launch
- Export every URL with traffic or links from the last twelve months.
- Map each one to its destination, and write the redirects as part of the build, not after it.
- Diff the copy on the top twenty pages. If a page is losing more than a third of its words, someone should sign off on that deliberately.
- Check the robots directives on both environments the morning of launch.
After launch
Watch coverage and impressions rather than sessions for the first fortnight. Sessions are noisy; impressions tell you whether the pages are still eligible to rank at all.
