When you hire a web design team to update and relaunch your website, it’s usually because you’re unsatisfied with the existing site in some way. Maybe you’re rebranding. Perhaps your existing site feels slow or old, and you know it’s putting some potential customers off. Or perhaps you’re just dealing with too many errors and issues creeping up and it’s reached the point where starting fresh will work better.
So far, so good. But the problem you’ll face is that not all web developers are up-to-date with digital marketing practices, and the launch creates new problems that can do real damage to the effectiveness of your Google ads and your organic search rankings.
If they’re not caught in time, mistakes made during a site redesign can take months to recover from.
Here at First Digital Media we take steps to avoid any of these issues, but we also work with our digital marketing clients whose sites were built elsewhere to help when they’re getting a new site launched.
We thought a guide to the most common issues might be useful to business owners preparing to launch a new version of their site or wondering what’s happened if one went wrong. The quicker you check these things and fix them if you need to, the sooner the recovery can begin.
Page URLs and Redirects
If your favourite café moves from one business address to another, they’ll spend a huge amount of effort making sure their customers know they’re moving and exactly where to find them. This includes a big poster in the window of the old address telling you where to find them now.
The digital equivalent of that poster is known as a redirect. If you had a subfolder on your website called /pizzas/ and on the new site, the same subfolder is now /pizzas-and-calzones/, your site needs to have a redirect in place. If not, the organic rankings the old page had will be lost, but with the redirect you can keep that valuable ranking history.
Put like that, it sounds very simple, but it’s amazing how often these redirects aren’t in place. And it’s not just about site subfolders and individual pages; it can be about whole site subdomains too.
If your website was at, say, www.examplecompany.co.uk and your web designer decides to switch to examplecompany.co.uk without the www. prefix, every single page address has changed. Using redirects to handle this should be done before the new version of the site goes live. That way, when search engines crawl the old page addresses, they find your forwarding address and you keep the ranking value you’d built up over years.
Earlier this year, Google reduced the amount of time they’ll ‘keep’ link equity when a page is removed without a redirect. That means that if this happens, the clock is ticking to realise it’s happened and get redirects into place before all that value is gone.
Lost or Misdirected Optimisation
A lot of the reason a webpage performs well in search boils down to content, in several types:
- Page content that’s well-written, useful, and which offers advice or insights you can’t find elsewhere is content that performs well
- Title tags should include the top keywords you want the page to rank for, but be written to engage search users
- Meta descriptions are like title tags in purpose but they’re longer and have room to do more, like including a call to action (CTA)
- Internal links pointed at a page with the right keywords in the anchor text (the text of the link itself) provide ranking factors, as well as making navigation easier
Site updates can often lose some or all of these:
- It’s not uncommon for web developers who aren’t aware what Google considers good content to have it written by AI. By definition, AI can’t offer any insights not found anywhere else; it usually also reads badly and can be incorrect.
- Title tags and meta descriptions can also be overlooked by web developers and not copied over, or a decision about site structure might be made that means a page needs different tags and meta description. For example, if you used to have a pizzas page and a calzones page, and you combine them into /pizzas-and-calzones/, neither page has a title tag or meta description that covers everything you want to optimise the page for.
- Changing the topics of pages can also mean that internal links have the wrong anchor text, and changing page addresses mean the ranking factor is lost in a redirect.
Ideally all of these should be caught before the new site goes live.
Google Connections, Ads, and Tracking
If you’re running Meta Ads that point to your website (ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads), you will have had to install a tracking pixel on the site at some point. This should also be installed on the new site; without that, your ads will function less effectively, costing you money. The tracking helps the ad algorithms to show ads to likely customers, after all.
Google Ads (and Microsoft Ads) also benefit from being able to track what users do on your site. Check whether your site is still connected to Google Analytics (and Google Search Console) and whether it has a Google Ads Remarketing Tag. These days, it’s most likely that these are all done by Google Tag Manager, but you should also test that they’re working correctly.
If your new site uses a different form plugin to the previous one, you may need to create new tags to successfully track it, and update your Ads settings to go with it. If you were using thank-you pages to track conversions, make sure the address hasn’t changed (or update the address in your Ads) and make sure the page is noindexed, so it won’t show up in search results.
These checks should be done as soon as possible after launching the new site – even a couple of days where conversions aren’t being tracked can affect Ads campaigns for months to come.
Does Everything Even Work?
Some things – ecommerce carts and contact forms in particular – can be tough to test properly before you put the site live. Sadly it’s not unheard of for businesses to launch a new site where at least one key function just doesn’t work.
Testing this should be the first thing you do after the site goes live. Ideally, you’d combine this with checking that conversion tracking is properly active.
Staging Site Issues
Your developer will have built the new version of your site elsewhere, on what we call a staging site. A lot of the addresses will have been slightly different, so for example your page examplecompany.co.uk/pizzas-and-calzones/ will have been built on stagingsite.com/examplecompany/pizzas-and-calzones/, and when the site is put live, these links will be updated.
Very occasionally, there’s an issue with this, and some key pages still link to the staging site. When that happens obviously it can create issues, especially as the staging version is usually unpublished.
However there’s another kind of problem that can come from staging sites, which happens when the staging site was both left live (so the pages are still up) and where the pages were not set to noindex (so the pages could be included in a search engine’s results, if they were crawled).
When this happens, you can find yourself in competition with your own staging site for some keywords. If you’ve run into other site launch problems as well (sadly not uncommon as a combination) you can even realise you’re losing to your own staging site.
The best tool to identify leftover staging site links is a website crawler, and the most popular crawler tool is called Screaming Frog. (The free version will only crawl 500 addresses, so if you’ve kept all the blogs from an old site or you’re running an eCommerce site, you’d definitely need the paid version.) Crawl your site with this and look at its external link report. If you see anything pointed at the old staging site, Screaming Frog can even give you a list of the pages with those links, which can make correcting this faster.
Launching at the Wrong Time
About this time last year, Games Workshop overhauled its web presence. It rolled several websites into one, changed almost all web addresses, and it did so at the start of its biggest business opportunity of the year; Christmas shopping. The linked case study goes into the many problems they created for themselves by doing that, and it stands as a reminder that even multinational businesses can mess this up if they don’t plan it all out carefully.
Launching a new website during your busy period amplifies the effect of any problems you have, and can mean losing a huge amount of business. Even when everything goes right, there’s usually a brief dip in performance before the site improves to do better than before. Having that dip when you should be bringing in the most business is handicapping yourself in a way you don’t need to.
On a much smaller scale, we can’t recommend putting your new site live on a Friday, as any issues it might have will probably go unnoticed until after the weekend. The previous site is, hopefully, still working – just not working well – so better to leave that in place and launch on the Monday.
Is Your Site Underperforming After Launch?
A number of our clients came to us because their sites had never recovered from mistakes made in the launch of a new website, and they needed to turn that around. On investigation we reliably found at least one of the issues above – in fact, it’s rare to run into just one of these mistakes. Developers who slip on one tend to slip on more than that.
If you’re concerned about your site’s performance then reach out to us; fill out our contact form or call us on 01524 544346.
