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Traffic Dropped After a Redesign or Replatform

Use this page if traffic dropped after a redesign, rebuild, or platform change and the team needs a technical explanation of what changed, not a generic SEO audit.

Use redesign recovery and technical SEO recovery work to isolate what changed in URLs, templates, rendering, or crawl signals before the organic traffic drop compounds.

Typical symptoms

  • Traffic, rankings, or indexed coverage dropped shortly after a redesign or replatform launched.
  • Some template groups or route families were hit much harder than others after release.
  • The site looks visually fine, but discovery, rendering, or URL behaviour no longer matches the previous estate.

Likely causes

  • Redirects, canonicals, internal links, or sitemap coverage changed more than expected during the launch.
  • The new templates are rendering weaker metadata, thinner content, or less crawlable HTML on important routes.
  • The redesign or rebuild shipped without route‑by‑route parity checks against the previous platform.

What I look at first

  • Quick check: compare a handful of high‑value pre‑launch URLs with the live versions for redirects, canonicals, rendered HTML, and internal‑link changes.
  • Which route families lost the most traffic first and whether the drop lines up with one template or one change type.
  • What changed in the release across metadata, URL policy, rendering, and crawl discovery.

How I help fix this

  • Reduce the traffic drop to the specific technical deltas that matter most commercially.
  • Prioritise the route families and template fixes most likely to recover visibility first.
  • Support rollout and validation of the recovery work so the team stops guessing.

When to bring me in

  • Bring me in as soon as the drop is visible and the launch window is still clear enough to inspect properly.
  • Bring me in when the redesign or replatform is live but nobody has a trusted parity view of what changed technically.

Related project experience

  1. Nando’s

    Senior software engineer on the UK and Ireland replatform, migrating Nando’s customer‑facing websites from legacy Drupal to a unified headless platform built with Next.js and Storyblok, with a focus on performance, accessibility, and SEO.

    Screenshot of the Nando’s website; part of John Kavanagh's development portfolio.

  2. John Lewis
    & Partners

    Senior developer as part of team 'Findability'. Led the digital implementation of the 'John Lewis & Partners' rebrand alongside new feature development, user journey optimisation, and performance improvements.

    Screenshot of the John Lewis website; part of John Kavanagh's development portfolio.

Related technical articles

  • 301 vs. 307 redirects

    11 July 2019

    301 and 307 redirects do different jobs. This guide explains when each one fits, what they tell browsers, and where SEO enters the picture.

  • Optimising HTML markup for SEO

    03 February 2017

    Optimising HTML improves SEO, accessibility, and user experience. Here, I explore semantic HTML, clean code, alt text, and other best practices.

  • Automatically generate `urllist.txt` from `sitemap.xml`

    06 January 2020

    Using PHP it is quick and easy to automatically generate your urllist.txt sitemap from your sitemap.xml file (for example, using gatsby-plugin-sitemap).

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    Technical SEO for JavaScript Applications

    Bring in engineering‑led SEO help when Google is not indexing important JavaScript pages because rendering, crawlability, metadata, or migration changes are getting in the way.

  3. Adjacent scenario

    JavaScript SEO Rendering and Indexing Fix

    Diagnose why Google is not indexing important JavaScript pages before incomplete HTML, unstable metadata, or routing changes keep them out of search.

  5. Related page

    WordPress to Next.js SEO Recovery

    Recover lost visibility after a WordPress‑to‑Next.js migration by tracing the technical gaps in redirects, canonicals, sitemaps, and rendering.

Questions teams usually ask

How is this different from a general SEO audit?
This is recovery work tied to a specific change window. The job is to compare the old and new estates route by route until the technical cause of the drop is clear, not to produce a broad list of generic SEO recommendations.
Can you still help if the old platform is no longer live?
Usually yes, as long as there is enough evidence from redirects, launch artefacts, cached pages, sitemaps, analytics, or deployment history to compare what important routes used to do with what they do now.

Tell me what needs fixing

Send me the affected page or route, point me at the code if that helps, and tell me what you expected to happen versus what is happening now. If this connects to a Next.js migration, technical SEO drop, performance issue, launch, or platform move, include that context too. I'll come back with the clearest next step.

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