Web shop redesign without losing organic traffic

TL;DR summary

1. Traffic does not fall after a web shop redesign because of the new design. It falls because of lost pages, deleted text and technical settings that nobody migrated.
2. The biggest risk is not your product pages. It is your category pages and filters, because those bring the most traffic from search.
3. The inventory of your current shop is the only step you cannot repeat later. If you did not record your URLs, you cannot redirect them.
4. Redirects must be permanent (301), and each one must lead to a page with the same content, never to the home page.
5. A drop in traffic in the first two to three weeks after launch is normal. A drop that lasts longer than six weeks is not.

A case we see several times a year

Picture an online seller of building materials. Eight thousand products, four hundred categories, and a web shop that was last redesigned in 2019. The design looks old, the checkout takes five steps, and on a phone half of the filters do not open. The decision to redesign is correct.

The new shop goes live. The week after, traffic from Google is down 41%. Three weeks later it is still 30% below the old level. The marketing agency says this is the usual movement after a redesign and that it will settle. It does not settle, and the traffic does not come back.

We hear this story several times a year. In our experience, the new design is almost never the reason. The reason is a migration that nobody planned properly.

Why traffic falls even though the shop is better

Search engines and AI assistants (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, ChatGPT and others) do not know your new shop. They know a list of URLs they have visited for years, and the content they found at those URLs. When the URLs change and the content is shortened or disappears, the search engine loses the link between what it knew and what is now there instead. This is what 301 redirects are for.

On a small website this is easy to handle. Fifteen pages mean fifteen 301 redirects and the job is finished. In a web shop with eight thousand products, four hundred categories and filters on top of that, we are talking about tens of thousands of URLs that the search engine has stored in its index. If you do not prepare the redirects, you lose the rankings you have built so far. A redesign of a web shop also has to be supported by proper technical search engine optimisation.

Three things that go wrong most often

1. The URLs change and there are no redirects.

A new platform often uses a different address structure. A page that used to sit at /category/adhesives/construction-adhesives/ now sits at /products/construction-adhesives/. If the old address leads nowhere, you lose everything that page had: its ranking, its backlinks and the bookmarks your clients saved.

2. Category descriptions disappear.

During a redesign, products are usually migrated but category descriptions are not. That is a problem, because category pages in a web shop bring the most traffic from general searches. Someone who searches for "construction adhesives" lands on the category, not on a single product.

3. Technical settings are not carried over.

Structured data, canonical links, breadcrumb navigation, the sitemap and the robots.txt file. Each of these was configured in the old shop. In the new one it is either left at a default or missing. The most painful mistake is the tag that blocks indexing and stays on the site after the test server. Visitors cannot see it, so it can sit there for days or even weeks before somebody notices. By then the shop has practically disappeared from search.

The inventory before the redesign is the one step you cannot make up later

Everything else can be corrected. The list of URLs cannot, because when the old shop is switched off, the list usually goes with it.

Before work on the new shop starts, you need four lists.

The first is a complete list of the URLs on your current shop, collected with a crawler, not taken from the sitemap (sitemap.xml). A sitemap is often incomplete, while a crawler also finds pages that have no internal links pointing to them.

The second is the list of URLs that actually bring traffic. Export it from Google Search Console for the last twelve months. We do not recommend an export for the last three months, because you would miss pages that depend on the season. A building materials retailer sells very different products in December than in the summer.

The third is the list of pages with backlinks. Those pages carry value that you cannot create again with new content.

The fourth is a snapshot of where you stand today: how many pages are indexed, what your monthly organic traffic is, what your conversion rate is, and how much revenue comes from organic traffic. You take these numbers from Search Console and from your web analytics. Without them, in two months you will not know whether the redesign worked.

These four tasks are part of a wider technical review of the shop.

301 redirects: where projects usually fail

A 301 redirect is an instruction to the server that the address somebody asked for is no longer available at that link, and that the content now sits at a new one. It sounds simple. In practice, web shop projects fail in four places.

Redirecting everything to the home page.

The most common and the most expensive mistake. Somebody writes a single rule that sends every old address to the home page. The search engine treats this as a 404 error and removes the page from its results. The rule is simple: every old address goes to the new address with the same or the closest content. If a product no longer exists, it goes to its category, not to the home page.

Redirect chains.

The old address leads to a second one, that one to a third, and only the third to the final page. Every extra step slows down loading and weakens the value that is passed on. Keep every redirect to a single step.

The wrong type of redirect.

For a permanent move, always use a permanent redirect (301). A temporary one (302) tells the search engine to keep the old address, which is not what you want during a redesign.

Forgotten URLs outside the product categories.

Pages of finished promotions, old news posts, terms and conditions pages, URLs with campaign tags. On their own they bring little traffic. Taken together, they bring more than people expect.

Content you should migrate, not rewrite

During a redesign there is often a temptation to rewrite all of the text. That can be the right decision, but not in the same step as the technical migration. If you change the URLs and the content at the same time, you will not be able to tell later what caused the drop in rankings.

This is why we recommend the following order: first migrate the existing content to the new platform in the same scope, then launch, and only four to six weeks later start improving the text.

What has to be migrated: page titles and meta descriptions, category descriptions, full product descriptions (not shortened versions), image alt texts and structured data. Structured data matters more for shops than ever, because it decides whether your product appears with its price and its rating in search results and in answers from AI assistants.

If you have eight thousand products and their data sits in several places at once, in supplier files, spreadsheets and the old shop, migrating by hand is not realistic. This is exactly the job a PIM system is built for a central database of product information (PIM) from which the shop is filled automatically. With a good PIM system in place, a web shop redesign becomes far simpler.

Launch day and the first month

On launch day, check five things:

1. The robots.txt file is correct and does not block the whole shop.
2. The tag that blocks indexing has been removed from the new pages.
3. The new sitemap has been submitted to Google Search Console.
4. A random sample of twenty old URLs from your list of most visited pages works.
5. Traffic and purchase tracking works on the new shop, which you confirm with a test order.

In the first month, follow the coverage report in Google Search Console and check the number of pages returning a 404 error every week. Correct every new error quickly, not after a few days. If nobody on the team follows those reports, make it part of your website maintenance and support.

A drop in traffic during a redesign is expected to some degree. The search engine has to visit several thousand URLs again, which takes several weeks in larger shops.

One practical rule from our work: if traffic does not start to come back after three weeks, this is not fluctuation. It is a mistake, and somebody has to find it.

Speed and the mobile experience are part of the redesign

A new shop is often slower than the old one, because it has larger images, more tracking scripts and a richer design. On phones, where most purchases happen today, you see the effect in the number of orders straight away.

Before launch, test the checkout on a phone, not only in the mobile view your browser offers. Convert the images to a modern format, and give the product pages the same attention as the rest of the shop.

How we approach redesigns at Kabi

At Kabi we develop web shops on our own platform, KabiCloud. For a redesign, this means that redirects and address management are part of the system and not something added afterwards, and that you manage the product catalogue from our PIM system.

How the project is set up matters just as much. The inventory of URLs, the redirects and the monitoring of errors after launch are normally part of the project when we run it.

If you are planning a redesign, you will find the wider picture on our e-commerce solutions page.

Conclusion

A web shop redesign is not a design project with some technical work attached. It is a migration of several thousand URLs, in which the design is one of the steps.

The next time you receive a quote for a redesign, look for three items in it: an inventory of the existing URLs, a mapping of old URLs to new ones, and monitoring of 404 errors in the first month after launch. If any of them is missing, this is not a quote for a redesign of your shop. It is a quote for a new web shop, and the risk to your results stays with you.