Website Redesign SEO: What to Check Before and After Launch

Why traffic drops after a new design

A familiar story: a company in Tashkent orders a fresh website, light and clean, with big photos and almost no text. It looks modern, yet a month later fewer enquiries arrive from Google. Search engines do not judge looks. They read page addresses, headings, copy and the links between sections. When all of that changes at once, every page gets evaluated from scratch.

A drop is not inevitable. It usually follows decisions made without search in mind, such as deciding that text spoils the layout or that old URLs are not worth keeping.

Website redesign SEO: what usually gets lost

Agree with your designer and developer that these elements will not change without sign-off from whoever handles SEO.

• Copy on service and category pages, cut as “unnecessary” for a cleaner layout
• H1 headings and subheadings swapped for catchy slogans
• Page titles and meta descriptions
• Internal links in the menu, footer and body text
• Structured data markup
• Pages that were left out of the migration even though they brought in customers

Compare the old and new sites before launch

Crawl both versions. The staging site can be password-protected, but the crawler must be able to get in. Compare page counts, URLs, H1s, titles, descriptions, text volume and internal links. Every difference is a task: restore it or accept it deliberately.

URLs deserve special attention. If the structure changes, you need a redirect map: each old address points by 301 to the closest matching new page, not everything to the homepage. Keeping the URLs is the safest option. Be most careful with pages that bring orders, such as services, catalogue categories and articles that other sites link to.

Speed, mobile and navigation

Animations, video and large images can make the new site slower than the old one. Many customers, especially outside the capital, open sites on a phone over mobile data, so test the staging version on a smartphone and not only on an office computer.

Check the mobile layout too. Key copy, prices and terms should not be hidden for the sake of brevity, because Google mainly looks at what the phone version shows.

Navigation matters as well. If a section such as delivery or wholesale disappears from the menu, it receives fewer links and a search engine may treat it as less important.

Pre-launch checklist

Mistakes here are common and costly. A site can stay blocked from indexing for weeks before anyone notices.

• The noindex tag left from the staging site is removed
• robots.txt does not block the whole site
• The sitemap lists the new URLs
• Canonical tags point to the right pages
• Analytics is installed and goals work: enquiries, calls, Telegram clicks, Click or Payme payments
• Contact and order forms actually send and reach a manager
• Redirects are spot-checked on the most important URLs

What to do after launch

In the first weeks, look at the data every day: traffic, indexing in Google Search Console, positions of key pages and 404 errors. Compare with the same period before the redesign rather than last week, since demand is seasonal for many businesses, for example ahead of Navruz.

Small fluctuations can happen. A sharp fall on specific pages is a signal to look for the cause immediately. The sooner a mistake is found, the sooner traffic recovers.

When to bring in an SEO specialist

At the prototype stage, not after traffic has fallen. A prototype still has room for copy, and the menu and URLs can still be planned. For a large site, consider updating in stages: one section first, watch the results, then the rest.

At markdev we join redesign projects at any stage: comparing versions, building the redirect map, checking the launch and tracking the numbers afterwards. If you are planning a new site or have already noticed a decline, tell us about it and we will work out together what can be kept and fixed.