Why do rankings drop after a new website?
Because the pages Google had learned to trust have moved or gone, and nothing told it where. Every ranking is attached to a specific address, and when the rebuild changes services/electrical to our-services, the old address returns an error, the ranking has nowhere to go, and the links other sites had pointed at it are wasted.
The other causes are quieter. Six service pages folded into one tidy page, which then ranks for none of the six. A heavier design that doubles the load time on a phone. A noindex tag left on from the staging site, which is more common than anyone admits. Content rewritten to sound nicer and stripped of the plain words people actually search for. Any one of these can cost a Harrogate firm the positions it took three years to earn, and they usually arrive together.
What should you do before the new site is built?
Crawl the old one and write everything down. A free crawler will list every address on the site; Search Console will tell you which of them earn clicks and for what; a backlink tool, or even a look at Search Console’s links report, shows which pages other websites point at. Put all of that in a spreadsheet with a column for where each page goes on the new site.
That spreadsheet is the migration. It stops a page that brings in Wakefield enquiries every month being quietly dropped because the designer thought it looked dated, and it forces the question of what the new structure is for. Do it before design starts, because a site map that changes after design is expensive and a site map that changes after launch is a ranking loss.
How should redirects be set up?
One permanent redirect from each old address to the single new page that best replaces it. Permanent means a 301, page to matching page; the electrical page goes to the new electrical page and nowhere else. Sending everything to the homepage is the mistake that looks like a fix, because Google treats a bulk redirect to the homepage much like a page that has gone, and the rankings go with it.
Keep them in place permanently. Old links on other sites, in emails and in directories will point at the old addresses for years, and Google keeps checking too. If you change domain, redirect the whole old domain page by page and keep it registered.
What should be checked on launch day?
Everything on this list, in the first hour, on the live site:
- The noindex tag and any password from staging have gone
- robots.txt allows crawling and points at the new sitemap
- Every old address redirects to the right page, tested from the spreadsheet
- The new sitemap is submitted in Search Console and the old one removed
- Page titles, descriptions and headings survived the build
- Analytics and form tracking are recording on the new site
- Load time on a phone is the same or better
- Internal links point at the new addresses and none of them chain through redirects
How long until rankings settle after a migration?
A few weeks, sometimes a couple of months, and a wobble in the first fortnight is normal. Google has to re-crawl every page, follow every redirect and decide that the new page is the old page in a new place. Done properly, most sites come back to where they were and then improve, because the rebuild usually fixed things as well. Check Search Console every day for that fortnight: coverage errors, a jump in pages marked not found, or a drop in impressions on a page that used to earn them are all visible there within days and cheap to fix while they are fresh.
Done badly, the drop arrives three or four weeks after launch, when the person who built the site has moved on and the invoice is paid. That timing is why so many Yorkshire businesses never connect the two.
What if the rankings have already gone?
Find the old addresses and redirect them now. The Wayback Machine will show you what the old site looked like, Search Console’s coverage report lists what Google is failing to find, and every week the redirects are missing costs a little more. Then compare the content: if a page that ranked has been cut to a paragraph, put the substance back.
Sites recover from this more often than you would think, provided somebody acts within a couple of months. We have designed, built and managed the Bond Brickwork website since 2018, and it sits at the top of Google for the commercial brickwork searches that matter. A site holds a position like that for years by being handled carefully every time it changes, and a migration is the biggest change a site goes through.
