Field guide
"We redesigned the site and traffic died": the four silent killers in every website migration
We hear versions of this story monthly: new website, proud launch, then leads quietly dry up. Nobody connects the two, because the site looks better than ever. Having measured many rebuilds side by side against the sites they replace, the damage almost always comes from the same four silent killers.
Vanished pages. The old site had 30 pages; the new design consolidated to 12. Every deleted page took its search standing with it. Broken addresses. Pages that moved without redirects — every old link, bookmark and search result now hits a dead end. Shrunken content. Designers trim "wordy" pages; machines read the trimmed site as a business with less substance. Lost technical signals. Titles, descriptions and structured data that lived in the old site and never got carried over.
None of these are visible in a design review. All of them are visible in a measurement — which is why we crawl the draft and the live site side by side before any launch and issue a plain verdict: what got better, what got worse, and what must be fixed before switching. The fixes are written to be forwarded directly to whoever built the new site.
If you take one thing from this: never approve a redesign from how it looks. Approve it from a before-and-after measurement. Looks are why you redesigned; measurements are what you live on afterward.