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Your team has spent months sweating over a stunning website relaunch. The wireframes looked perfect. The copy sang. The devs pulled a few all-nighters to get it out the door.
But then… disaster.
Your organic traffic has tanked. Leads have dried up. Rankings you spent years building have vanished almost overnight. If that’s you, take a deep breath. You are not alone.
It’s surprisingly common for websites to suffer a sharp organic traffic drop after a redesign or migration. In fact, up to a third of website migrations experience significant SEO-related performance issues if not properly planned and monitored. That’s a huge risk, considering the time, budget and effort you’ve poured into getting your shiny new site live.
Here’s the good news: these drops are fixable. With the right recovery plan, most businesses can regain and even improve on their previous search performance. This guide will show you how to take control, stop the bleeding, and protect your investment.
Let’s rescue those rankings.
Let’s be honest, redesigning a website is stressful enough. The last thing you need is for your organic traffic to vanish once you push the new site live. But it happens more often than you’d think. Here’s why.
When you change your site, its structure, URLs, content, or even its tech stack, you risk breaking the pathways that search engines have relied on to understand and rank your pages. If you don’t actively protect those signals, Google can effectively see your relaunch as a whole new website, wiping out all that hard-earned authority.
Want proof? Try this Google search: site:staging.*.co.uk and you’ll see plenty of unfinished staging sites accidentally indexed like below.
Estimates vary, but industry data suggests up to a third of migrations experience significant organic performance losses if not properly handled. That’s huge, and avoidable.
When the new site goes live, these are your absolute top priorities:
Treat these like your emergency room triage. Get them right, and you’ll be in a much stronger position to start recovering rankings.
OK, deep breath. If your rankings and traffic have already taken a hit after the relaunch, don’t panic. With a structured approach, you can recover most of the lost ground and even improve your long-term SEO performance.
This four-week emergency recovery plan is designed to help you fix the essentials first, then stabilise and optimise.
When traffic drops after a relaunch, it can feel like everyone’s breathing down your neck — the CEO, the sales team, even the board. That’s stressful. But the way you handle that first conversation can make a huge difference in keeping confidence high while you fix things.
Here’s a simple email you can copy and adapt:
Subject: Quick Update on Website Relaunch Traffic
Hi [name],
Following the relaunch, we’re seeing a temporary drop in organic traffic, which is fairly common with major site changes.
We’re actively working through a recovery plan:
- Checking redirects
- Submitting updated sitemaps
- Auditing for errors
- Monitoring keyword recovery
I’ll keep you updated each week on progress. If you have any questions, please shout.
Thanks, [your name]
Even with the best checklist, sometimes you hit a wall. Here’s how to know when to call in a technical SEO expert:
We offer a site migration recovery consultation, where we’ll:
Contact us for honest, expert advice so you can protect all the hard work you put into your relaunch.
Traffic drops after a website relaunch are surprisingly common, affecting up to a third of website migrations. This happens because search engines can see your redesigned site as entirely new, breaking the pathways they’ve relied on to understand and rank your pages. Common causes include missing 301 redirects, poorly migrated metadata, changes to site architecture, robots.txt issues, and outdated XML sitemaps.
Initial improvements typically take 2-4 weeks with proper action, while full recovery usually occurs within a few months. The timeline depends on how quickly you identify and fix the underlying issues, and how significant the changes were to your site structure.
In the first 48 hours, prioritise these checks: test all 301 redirects, crawl the site for missing critical pages, inspect Google Search Console for error spikes, verify robots.txt isn’t blocking key pages, and submit your updated XML sitemap. These are your emergency triage items.
Yes, most traffic drops are preventable with proper planning. Key prevention strategies include mapping all URL changes with proper 301 redirects, maintaining consistent metadata, preserving site architecture where possible, avoiding robots.txt or noindex blocks on live sites, and preparing updated XML sitemaps before launch.
Consider bringing in experts if traffic hasn’t improved after 4-6 weeks, you’ve lost high-value keywords, made massive structural changes, lack in-house technical skills, or face mounting stakeholder pressure. Professional help can speed recovery and prevent costly mistakes.
Essential tools include Screaming Frog or Sitebulb for site crawling, Google Search Console for monitoring errors and indexation, Google Analytics for traffic comparison, and tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs for keyword tracking. These help identify problems and monitor recovery progress.
Stay calm and factual, explaining it as a temporary, fixable issue. Use plain language to describe how redesigns can confuse search engines, set realistic 2-4 week timelines for initial improvements, focus on your solution plan rather than apologising, and provide weekly progress updates to maintain trust.
Missing or broken 301 redirects are the biggest culprit. When you change a page’s URL without properly mapping the old address to the new one, search engines and users hit dead ends, wasting years of built-up link authority and rankings.
You’ve now got a solid action plan, but staying ahead of SEO issues means having the right tools and resources on your side. Here’s what to bookmark:
We’ve shared loads of helpful tips on our own blog and authored other industry articles too:
Bookmark these – they’ll save you stress next time you go through a relaunch.
You’ve got this. And if you need a second opinion, we’re always here to help.
If you’d like a PDF version of this guide, then you can click here to download your very own copy.