We redesigned our site after 6 years: Costs, SEO drop, and website redesign examples

Four years ago, we rebuilt our e-commerce site on a similar 22,000 USD budget. Organic traffic tanked by a third during the first 2 months. But because our checkout completion rate improved, monthly revenue surpassed old numbers by month five, and by the end of year one, our sales had doubled.

The technical root causes behind an organic drop usually boil down to: 1) Broken heading tag hierarchies compared to the old template, 2) Stripped-back internal linking in the new menu structure, 3) Missing or broken structured data schema migrations. Definitely check your server logs to see how frequently search bots are hitting the new URLs.

seeing that budget jump from $18k to $27k brings back memories of our own redesign nightmare. a project they promised in three months ended up taking eight. the panic during that traffic slump is brutal but your load speed is a massive win, hang in there.

When setting up redirects, did you map old product pages 1:1 to their exact new equivalents, or did you mass-redirect discontinued products to the main category? Bulk redirects can be flagged as irrelevant by search engines and tank your rankings fast.

exact same thing happened to us traffic was in the gutter for the first thhree months we even fought with the agency but by the end of the fourth month charts were higher than before imo just wait it out without messing with the pages

The best move right now is to open Search Console and identify the top 25 pages that lost the most clicks over the last 6 weeks. Check the Wayback Machine for their old copy and port it over to the new design completely; you'll see a quick recovery.

Agencies usually prioritize aesthetics, trimming down text to make lots of whitespace. If the detailed technical descriptions on your old site were cut under the guise of "streamlining," that organic traffic won't just magically return on its own. Watch out for content getting watered down while the design gets prettier.

The noticeable improvement in page load times and the uptick in mobile conversions indicate that the project's technical foundation is solid. Once the search engine re-indexing cycle runs its course, the enhanced user experience signals should gradually lift organic traffic beyond its previous benchmarks.

Same here.

Correct.

just a heads-up and the moment you depend on a single client, you no longer set the price.

if you post the result here it will help others too.

I have no experience with website redesign examples, so I'm asking. Mistakes made on the website redesign examples side are usually reversible but expensive.

This is my opinion, I'm not claiming it's absolute truth.

I'm curious too.

I'm in the same situation, that's why I'm asking. Don't hesitate to ask; those who don't ask always pay more.

If you post the result here it will help others too.

I partly agree, partly disagree. When you try to change everything at once, nothing settles.

I'm also curious if anyone does it differently.

Just a heads-up. Pausing growth to breathe is also a strategy, nobody says that.

Taking notes for two weeks yields better results than a six-month estimate. Good luck with that.

You're right.

Following.