Website lost rankings after a redesign: the recovery checklist

The four causes, in order of how often we find them

URLs changed without redirects. The redesign moved pages (slugs changed, sections reorganised) and nobody mapped old to new. Every old URL Google knows now 404s: the rankings those URLs earned evaporate with them. This one cause does most of the damage in most post-redesign disasters.

Titles and headings rewritten. The new copy is fresher and vaguer: pages that ranked for specific phrases now have titles targeting nothing in particular. Rankings follow relevance; relevance was redesigned away.

Content trapped in JavaScript. The old site served HTML; the new one renders content client-side. If Google executes it slowly or partially, pages that were fully visible become thin snapshots.

Internal link ghosts. Navigation and body links pointing at old URLs (or at pages that no longer exist) dilute crawl priority and strand link equity.

The recovery sequence

Inventory the damage: compare the old URL set (Wayback Machine, old sitemap, the previous CMS export) against the new. Build the 301 map for every lost URL. Restore outcome-promising titles for the top 50 pages by past traffic (Search Console’s pre-redesign queries tell you what each page ranked for). Check the new pages’ content is server-rendered HTML, real text in the source. Then re-crawl the site for broken internal links. Expect weeks: recovery is Google re-learning, the fixes just let it.

When to bring us in

A post-redesign traffic collapse is time-critical: the 301 map gets more valuable the sooner it ships, and every week of 404s compounds. Migration without losing SEO is a service we run end to end - the map, the titles, the verification - and if the redesign already shipped without one, that same service is the recovery.