How much of a drop is normal, and how much is not
Even a flawless redesign causes movement. Google has to recrawl everything, re-evaluate every page, and reconsolidate signals onto the new URLs. A 10–20% dip over the first 2–4 weeks, followed by recovery and usually by exceeding the previous level, is expected behaviour.
A 40–60% drop that has not recovered after 6 weeks is not “the settling period”. It is a concrete error, usually one of the ones below, and the sooner it is found the more is recovered. After three months some signals have already been reassigned to competitors and do not fully come back.
This is why the before-measurement matters. Export your positions and impressions for the last 3 months from Search Console before launch. Without that export you cannot prove what was lost, nor find where.
Causes 1 and 2: the URLs and the content
1. URLs changed without 301 redirects. The number one cause by a distance. The old site had /web-services.html, the new one has /services/web-development/. Without a permanent redirect from old to new, every page starts from zero and the links you accumulated over years land in a 404.
The rule: every indexed old URL needs a 301 to its nearest new equivalent. Not to the homepage — Google treats that as a soft 404 and transfers nothing. If there is no equivalent, pick the closest category page.
2. Copy was cut for aesthetics. Designers love airy pages. If the old page had 1200 words answering real questions and the new one has 200 words and a large photo, you deleted exactly the content Google was showing you for. The new design has to house the text, not replace it.
Causes 3, 4 and 5: the invisible ones
3. The new site stayed blocked in robots.txt. Staging was closed off so it would not be indexed, and at launch nobody removed the block. Or WordPress's “Discourage search engines” checkbox stayed on. The effect is total: you disappear completely within days. Always the first check after launch.
4. Titles and descriptions were auto-regenerated. A new plugin applies one template everywhere: “Page Name | Company Name”. Titles written over years, containing the words people search for, vanish with one button press. Export them first.
5. Structured data was not carried over. If you had product, local business, or FAQ markup and the new site does not, you lose the rich results — the stars, the prices, the expandable questions. Positions may hold, but CTR visibly falls.
Cause 6: the new site is slower than the old one
This happens more often than it should, and it is counterintuitive: the new site looks modern, but it has scroll animations, fonts loaded from three sources, uncropped 2 MB images, and a component library pulling 400 KB of JavaScript for a carousel.
Check before launch, on mobile, with a throttled connection: LCP under 2.5 seconds, INP under 200 ms, CLS under 0.1. If the old site passed and the new one does not, you have shipped a regression Google will notice.
The most common culprit is images. A banner exported straight from Figma at 3000 px wide and 2.4 MB weighs as much as the rest of the page combined. Modern formats and correct dimensions usually solve 70% of the problem without touching the design.
The checklist, before and after
Before launch: export every indexed page and 3 months of positions from Search Console; export the existing titles and descriptions; build the old URL → new URL map for every indexed page, not just the ones in the menu; verify on staging that the new pages have their text in the HTML rather than only after scripts load; measure Core Web Vitals on both versions and compare.
On launch day: check robots.txt and the absence of a noindex tag; test 10–15 old URLs and confirm they 301 to the right destination in a single hop; submit the new sitemap in Search Console; keep the old sitemap reachable for a few weeks so Google discovers the redirects faster.
In the first 30 days: watch the Pages section in Search Console daily for new errors; check the 404 report; compare impressions on the pages that matter against the before-export. If an important page has dropped out of the index, that is fixed in days, not months.
At ARTYONIX, a redesign starts at €900 and includes the full 301 redirect map and 60 days of ranking monitoring after launch. If a redesign has already happened and traffic dropped, a €290 audit says within 5 days which of the six causes is yours — usually it is one, and it is fixed quickly.
What to remember
- A 10–20% dip for 2–4 weeks is normal; a 50% drop that does not recover has a concrete cause.
- Export positions and titles from Search Console BEFORE launch — without them you cannot find what was lost.
- Every indexed old URL needs a 301 to its nearest equivalent, not to the homepage.
- Do not let the design delete the copy: the airy 200-word page loses what the 1200-word one earned.
- Check robots.txt and noindex within the first hour of launch — it is the error with the most total effect.
- Compare Core Web Vitals old versus new: the modern site is often slower than the one it replaces.