My "fix and flip" website project crashed hard after 3 months of work

I took on a redesign for a local HVAC company in Atlanta back in March. Their old site was ugly but it ranked and brought in calls. I spent 3 months building a shiny new site with fancy animations and a better layout. After launch, their traffic dropped 60% and phone calls went down to almost nothing. I had to rollback to the old site after 2 weeks and eat the cost of development. The new design broke their local SEO signals and Google didn't trust the new structure. Now I'm rebuilding it piece by piece, keeping the old URLs and content mostly the same. Has anyone else had a clean redesign kill their rankings like this?

2 comments

2 Comments

oscarm242d ago

Oh man, that's a rough one. I did something similar with a client who ran a landscaping business. Their old site was this clunky thing from 2012 but it had been around forever and Google loved it. I swapped in a fresh modern design with new page names and boom, they vanished. I remember getting a call from the owner asking why his phone stopped ringing. We had to put the old site back up too. That feeling of watching your work crash and burn is awful but its a good lesson about not fixing what isn't broken, at least not all at once. Your mileage may vary but I've found that keeping the exact same URL structure is the only safe way to do a redesign.

sam_harris682d ago

Exactly. The URL structure thing is the big one people overlook. I've seen it happen where someone changes a few folder names or adds a trailing slash and suddenly all their backlinks go to 404s. Google's algorithm loves consistency, so if you mess with the paths it takes weeks to rebuild that trust. I learned the hard way with a client in the roofing industry. We changed their service pages from /roofing to /services/roofing and lost half their traffic for three months. Had to set up 301 redirects for every single old URL just to get back to where we started. It's boring but you really have to map out every change before you launch.