Skip to content
PROBLEM · SOLVED BY SEO & ORGANIC GROWTH · PROGRAMMATIC WEB DEVELOPMENT · CONTENT & EDITORIAL

Lost rankings after a redesign. Almost always self-inflicted, almost always recoverable.

A redesign that drops rankings 30-60% usually broke five fixable things. Here's the technical recovery audit and the order we run it in.

Get the diagnosis → Book a 30-min diagnostic
Symptoms

If any of these sound familiar, this is your problem.

01

Organic traffic dropped 30-60% within 2-4 weeks of launch

02

Pages that ranked for years now don't even appear in Search Console

03

New URLs throwing 404s with no redirects in place

04

Schema, meta titles, internal links — all looked good in Figma, all broken on staging

Why it happens

The root cause — in plain English.

Designers and developers solve for visual coherence. Search engines reward continuity of URL, content depth, internal link equity and schema. Most redesigns ship with a redirect map that handles half the URLs, a content rewrite that strips the very phrases that ranked, and a nav rebuild that orphans key pages. Google doesn't know it's "the same site" — it sees a new site that's 40% emptier with broken legacy URLs.
How we diagnose it

The first three things we check.

Five-step recovery audit. One: pull a Screaming Frog crawl of the new site against a Wayback snapshot of the old; flag every URL that lost its redirect or its primary keyword. Two: compare H1, title and word count on every commercial page pre/post launch. Three: rebuild internal linking so every money page has 5+ contextual inbound links. Four: re-apply schema (Organization, LocalBusiness, Service, FAQ). Five: log-file check that Googlebot is actually crawling the new URLs at the old rate.
The solution

The pillars that fix this.

Each pillar is productised — fixed scope, fixed weekly delivery, walk-away rights at every 90-day cycle.

PILLAR

SEO & Organic Growth

Open the full pillar to see the productised stack, deliverables, pricing and 90-day roadmap.

Open the pillar → PILLAR

Programmatic Web Development

Open the full pillar to see the productised stack, deliverables, pricing and 90-day roadmap.

Open the pillar → PILLAR

Content & Editorial

Open the full pillar to see the productised stack, deliverables, pricing and 90-day roadmap.

Open the pillar →
The cost of waiting

Organic recovery from a botched redesign typically takes 4-9 months — every week without the audit is another week of paid ads subsidising rankings you used to own for free.

First action this week: Crawl your old site on Wayback and your new site with any free crawler — diff the URL lists and the redirect map gap is your first repair list.

Book the 30-min diagnostic →
Free 2-page diagnostic

Send your domain. We’ll send back a 2-page diagnosis.

Specific to your stack, scoped to this problem. Three quick wins. A tailored band for the work it would take. No call required.

No card required · Your data stays private · One reply, then nothing unless you ask

Where this hits hardest

The industries that feel this most.

INDUSTRY

Professional Services & B2B

Open the industry hub to see how we run this work for professional services & b2b operators.

Open the hub → INDUSTRY

Real Estate & Property

Open the industry hub to see how we run this work for real estate & property operators.

Open the hub → INDUSTRY

Trades & Home Services

Open the industry hub to see how we run this work for trades & home services operators.

Open the hub →
Adjacent problems

Operators with this problem usually have these too.

PROBLEM

We're not on page one for anything that matters

Page-one rankings come from intent, indexation and authority — not blog volume. Here's the diagnostic order we run and what we fix first.

Open the diagnosis → PROBLEM

We don't get leads from Google — at all

If Google sends you no leads, it's rarely a ranking problem. It's usually intent, indexation or a contact form nobody can find. Here's where we look first.

Open the diagnosis → PROBLEM

Our site is slow and we're losing visitors

A slow site costs rankings, leads and bounce rate — but the cause is usually pagebuilders, image weight and third-party scripts, not hosting. Here's the fix order.

Open the diagnosis → PROBLEM

Our content sounds like everyone else's

When all your competitors' websites read the same, generic content fails twice — Google and humans both ignore it. Here's how we rewrite for differentiation.

Open the diagnosis →

Browse all 30 problems →

Three ways to fix this

Read the playbook, get coached, or have us ship the fix.

You can solve this yourself with the playbook below, get a senior practitioner reviewing your work each week, or hand the whole pillar over on a productised retainer. Whichever you pick, the canon is identical.

DIY · Self-serve

Read the playbook

If you have an in-house team with the bandwidth to run an audit and ship the fix yourselves, the playbook is free.

From £0

144 free playbooks · templates £49+

The full diagnosis, the audit checklist, the deliverable templates, and the 90-day roadmap. Same canon we use on retainer.

  • 50+ page playbook for the pillar that fixes this
  • Audit checklist — the 8–10 things to check first
  • Deliverable templates — GA4 spec, briefs, schemas
  • Quarterly office hours — bring your work, get reviewed
Open the playbook →
DWY · Done with you

Coach us through it

For teams that have hands but want a senior practitioner reviewing the work each week and unblocking quickly.

From £750 / mo

Coaching · cohort · sprint

Weekly 1:1 or team coaching, a custom course built around this exact problem, plus optional embedded sprints.

  • Weekly 90-minute coaching with a named practitioner
  • Custom course built around fixing this exact problem
  • Embedded sprints — we sit in your tools 1–2 weeks
  • Audit pack with named owners and dated steps
See coaching plans →
Most chosen
DFY · Done for you

Ship the fix on retainer

We run the pillar that fixes this, end-to-end. Fixed scope, weekly delivery, server-side tracking from form-fill to closed-won.

£1,500 – £6,000+ / mo

Foundation · Compound · Architect

The bands above. We diagnose in week one, ship the first fix in week two, and run the cycle on rolling 90-day terms with walk-away rights.

  • Productised pillar with named owner and dated 90-day roadmap
  • Server-side tracking from form-fill to closed-won
  • Weekly delivery — no scope creep, no surprise invoices
  • You own everything — tools, data, accounts, content
Book a discovery call →
Ready to fix it

Book the 30-min diagnostic.

Bring one number you want moved and one constraint you cannot break. We’ll spend the first five minutes on those, the next twenty on the playbook that fits, and the last five on whether we’re the right studio for you.

Book the call → Browse all 30 problems
Operating across the Weir family network — Josh Weir·Mark Weir·Weir Digital Media·CMW Consultants