The site looks better and the enquiries stopped
It is almost never the design. It is one of five causes, all findable in an afternoon, and the order you check them in decides whether you buy the right fix.
The call we get most often after a redesign is the same one every time: the site looks better and the enquiries have stopped. It is almost never the design. It is one of five things, all of which are findable in an afternoon and most of which are recoverable if somebody looks quickly.
The five
- Redirects. The old URLs returned 404 or all went to the homepage, which is the same thing as deleting them. This is the most common cause by a wide margin.
- Content that got shorter. A redesign that replaced three paragraphs with a headline removed the thing the page ranked for, and the design review never noticed because the page looks better.
- Pages that quietly disappeared. The old site had forty pages and the new one has twelve, and nobody checked which of the twenty-eight were earning.
- A staging configuration that shipped. A noindex tag or a disallow rule that was correct on staging and fatal in production.
- The form. It is not the traffic at all: the form posts nowhere, or the notification goes to an address nobody reads. Always test this first, because it takes two minutes.
The order to check in
Test the form, then compare the old URL list against the new one, then look at indexation, then compare word counts on your five best pages before and after. That order is deliberate: it runs cheapest first and it separates a traffic problem from a conversion problem before anybody spends money on the wrong one. A business panicking about rankings when the form is broken is about to buy the wrong service.
How long recovery takes
If the cause was redirects or a staging flag, most of the loss comes back within a few weeks of the fix, because the pages were only ever unreachable rather than devalued. If the cause was deleted pages or gutted content, recovery means putting the content back, and that takes as long as the original pages took to earn their position. The expensive version of this problem is the one nobody diagnosed for six months.
The migration checklist that prevents all five is in moving a site without losing the rankings.
