The new site launched, everyone was pleased with it, and three weeks later organic traffic is down by half. This is common enough to have a standard diagnostic order, and following that order matters — the causes are not equally likely, and the expensive ones look like the cheap ones from a dashboard.
First: is the site indexable at all?
Check before anything else, because it is the single most common cause and the most embarrassing. Staging environments carry noindex tags and blocking robots.txt files, and those settings ship to production more often than anyone admits.
Fetch your own homepage and a template page and read the raw response. Look for a noindex meta tag, an X-Robots-Tag header, and a disallow rule covering the path. Two minutes, and it explains a startling share of post-launch collapses.
Work from "can Google see it" upward to "is it as good". Every hour spent on content quality is wasted if a header is telling crawlers to stay away.
Second: did the URLs change, and were they redirected?
If URLs changed, every old one needs a 301 to its closest equivalent. Not to the homepage — to the specific page that replaced it. A redirect to something unrelated is treated as a soft 404 and passes nothing at all.
The check that finds this fastest: take a list of your top fifty URLs by impressions from before the launch, request each one, and record the status and final destination. Anything returning 404, or landing on the homepage, is a ranking you have thrown away rather than moved.
Third: did the content survive the template change?
Redesigns frequently shorten pages. Copy that felt long in a design review was often the copy answering the query, and a page that lost half its substance will lose the rankings that substance earned.
Compare an archived version of a key page against the new one. Look for removed sections, removed headings, and text that moved behind a tab or accordion. Content hidden behind interaction is still indexed, but if it was removed entirely there is nothing to index.
Treating a redesign as a visual project with an SEO review at the end. By then the URL structure is set, the copy is cut, and the cheap fixes have become expensive ones.
Fourth: did internal linking change shape?
New navigation means a new link graph. Pages that were two clicks from the homepage can end up buried, and pages linked from every old template can lose their links entirely.
Check the pages that dropped most and count how many internal links now point to each. A page that lost its links lost the thing that was keeping it visible, and this is one of the few causes that fixes itself once noticed.
Fifth: is it slower, or does it render differently?
New frameworks change how content reaches the browser. If the redesign moved from server-rendered HTML to client-side rendering, the content may now depend on JavaScript execution that does not always happen the way you expect.
Use the URL inspection tool to see the rendered HTML Google actually got. If the main content is missing there, you have found it. Performance regressions are worth checking too, though they rarely cause a drop of this magnitude by themselves.
The order matters
| Check | Time | How often it is the cause |
|---|---|---|
| Indexability blocks | 2 minutes | Often |
| Missing or wrong redirects | 30 minutes | Very often |
| Content removed by the new template | 1 hour | Often |
| Internal linking changes | 1 hour | Sometimes |
| Rendering and performance | Half a day | Sometimes |
How long does recovery take?
Weeks, and the timeline depends on how quickly Google recrawls the affected URLs. Fixing redirects on your top pages and requesting indexing for the most important ones speeds up the front of the queue; the rest recovers as the site is recrawled normally.
Do not stack changes while waiting. If you fix five things at once and traffic returns, you have learned nothing about which mattered, and the next redesign will repeat whichever one you did not identify.
Start with the raw response of your own homepage. It takes two minutes and it is the check that most often ends the investigation.
Traffic dropped after a relaunch?
We will work the diagnostic order, find what actually broke, and get the recoverable rankings back.
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