Drop in traffic after redesign

[Gordian]

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?

[crackingmedia]

Then I think you will see a recovery and possible improvement, but check through Paul's suggestions.

Peter

[Gordian]

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.

[crackingmedia]

That's a great detailed answer Paul!

Peter

[crackingmedia]

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

[ThompsonPaul]

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.