A redesign drops traffic when it breaks something Google relied on. The common breaks: old URLs that ranked now return a 404 error or redirect to the homepage, a leftover noindex tag tells Google to drop pages, or the content appears only after JavaScript runs. Those are on your site, so they’re fixable, and we guarantee the fix.
| Signal | What it means | How to check it yourself |
|---|---|---|
| Old URLs return a 404 error | Pages that ranked no longer exist at their old address, so Google drops them and their links lead nowhere. | Take five URLs from your old sitemap or the Wayback Machine and open each one. Note any “not found” page. |
| Old URLs redirect to the homepage | Google may treat a redirect to an unrelated page, such as the homepage, as a missing page (a “soft 404”), so the old page’s rankings don’t carry over. | Open the same old URLs and see where you land. Each should land on its matching new page. |
| A noindex tag on live pages | The page tells Google to leave it out of search results. Staging sites often ship with it. | Open a key page, view the source, and search for “noindex”. |
| Canonical tags point elsewhere | The page tells Google the real version lives somewhere else, often the staging site or the old domain. | In the same source view, search for “canonical” and read the URL it points to. |
| Content appears only after JavaScript runs | Google may see an empty or thin page. | View the source (not the inspector) of a key page. If your main text isn’t in it, it’s rendered by JavaScript. |
| The domain changed | Every page has a new address, and Google has to move its standing from the old domain to the new one. | Open an old URL on the old domain and check it lands on the matching page on the new one. |
Old URLs. We pull your pages as they were before the change from the Wayback Machine’s archive and request each one live. We count how many return a 404 error, redirect to the homepage, or bounce through a chain of redirects, and we list examples.
Domain moves. If the domain changed, we check whether old URLs redirect page to page or all land on the new homepage.
Indexing blocks. We read the live pages for noindex tags, canonical tags that point somewhere else, and robots.txt rules that stop Google crawling.
Rendering. We check whether your main content is in the HTML Google first receives, or appears only after JavaScript runs.
Lost clicks by page (Autopsy). In Search Console we line up clicks by page against the change date. If the pages that broke are the pages that lost traffic, the redesign did it.
Then Google. Only after all that do we compare the drop date with Google’s update calendar.
A Google update landed in the same quarter.
Google confirms a ranking update about once a month, so a relaunch and an update often overlap. If pages that didn’t change fell too, Google is part of it.
GoogleRankings held but clicks fell.
If your old pages still rank and get fewer clicks, look at AI answers above them.
AIThe analytics tag broke.
If analytics shows a drop and Search Console clicks don’t, the counting broke, not the traffic.
Is it real?A heating company’s estimated US search visits fell 57% year over year in April 2026, two months after a redesign that left 16 of 30 sampled old URLs returning 404, and as Google’s March 2026 core update finished. The redesign’s part is Recoverable.
A heating company
| Month | Estimated visits per month (US search) |
|---|---|
| January 2025 | 436 |
| February 2025 | 443 |
| March 2025 | 418 |
| April 2025 | 474 |
| May 2025 | 351 |
| June 2025 | 335 |
| July 2025 | 333 |
| August 2025 | 458 |
| September 2025 | 486 |
| October 2025 | 386 |
| November 2025 | 229 |
| December 2025 | 223 |
| January 2026 | 348 |
| February 2026 | 448 |
| March 2026 | 441 |
| April 2026 | 204 |
| May 2026 | 200 |
| June 2026 | 209 |
| July 2026 | 193 |
| August 2026 | 348 |
| September 2026 | 356 |
| October 2026 | 332 |
All 30 sampled old URLs redirect to pages on the new domain, none to its homepage. By the owner’s account, Bing traffic came back within weeks; six months on, Google traffic is still far below where it was. Waits on Google.
Usually, yes. Broken URLs, homepage redirects, noindex tags and rendering problems grade as Recoverable: the fix is in your hands, and Rescue makes it and verifies it. How fast rankings return is up to Google, so we don’t promise a date or a traffic number.
Domain moves are the slow exception and usually grade as Waits on Google. In a study of 892 domain migrations, organic traffic took 523 days on average to return to its old level, and 17% had not returned after 1,000 days (Dan Taylor, founder of 10 Spurs, Search Engine Journal, January 8, 2025).
Your developer, by default. On Shopify, Webflow, WordPress, Squarespace or Wix, give us temporary access and we upload the redirect files ourselves, at no extra charge.
Timing: about two weeks to verified fixes.
Half to start. The other half when our crawl confirms every old URL resolves to the right page and the site is fully indexable. If the crawl fails because of our map, we fix it at no charge.
After an Autopsy. The Autopsy fee counts in full toward Rescue if you book within 30 days.
Directly, from your Cause Check. If the Cause Check already shows broken old URLs, book Rescue now. The Autopsy is included, so the first payment is half the Rescue price or the Autopsy price, whichever is higher. If the Autopsy finds your site wasn’t the cause, we refund everything you paid above the Autopsy price.
Launch Cover maps every old URL before launch, crawls the site on launch day, and watches it for 60 days. If traffic drops because of anything on our checklist, Rescue is free.
Because “in place” can mean every old URL lands on the homepage. We request each sampled URL and record where it ends up and whether that page matches the old one.
That’s up to Google, so we don’t promise a date. Fixing the URLs is what’s in your control, and our crawl confirms it’s done.
Yes, that’s the default. The tickets are written for them, and our crawl checks the result either way.
It’s the same suspect and the slowest to recover. Every old URL has to redirect page to page to the new domain, and even when it does, Google can take a long time to catch up.