Enquiries dropped after the new website launched. What to check first

A redesign that loses traffic has almost always broken one of five things, and the first two account for most of it. Old addresses that now lead nowhere, pages accidentally hidden from search engines, content quietly deleted in the name of tidying up, tracking that stopped recording, or forms that no longer work. Four of the five are recoverable in days once you find them. The order you check them in matters, because the cheapest and most common cause is first.

The situation is miserable and extremely common. The site looks better, everyone was pleased on launch day, and three weeks later the enquiries have halved. Nobody wants to say the new site caused it, so a month gets spent debating whether it is seasonal.

It is usually not seasonal. Work through these in order.

1. Did the addresses change?

This is the single most common cause, by a wide margin.

Every page on your old site had an address. If the new site uses different addresses and nobody told search engines where each old page moved to, then every link, every bookmark and every accumulated ranking signal now points at nothing. Google calls this a site move with URL changes and has detailed guidance on site moves and migrations, which is worth reading even after the fact.

How to check. Find a list of the old addresses — an old sitemap file, a Search Console export from before launch, or an analytics export of last year's landing pages. Take the twenty that got the most traffic and open each one. If any returns a "not found" page, you have found your problem.

How to fix it. Each old address needs a permanent redirect to the closest matching new page. Closest matching, not the homepage — redirecting everything to the homepage is treated as a soft error and recovers almost nothing. Google's guidance on redirects sets out the methods.

How long recovery takes. Usually a few weeks once the redirects are live, sometimes faster. This is the most recoverable version of the problem, which is why it is worth checking first.

2. Is the new site telling search engines to go away?

Staging sites are normally blocked from search engines deliberately, so that a half-built site does not appear in results. The block is supposed to be removed at launch. Sometimes it is not.

How to check. Two things. Open yoursite.com/robots.txt and look for Disallow: / — that blocks everything. Then view the page source of a few key pages and search for noindex. Either will remove you from search results entirely, and both are a one-line fix.

If your traffic did not decline gradually but fell off a cliff about a week after launch, this is the first thing to suspect. It is also the most embarrassing and the fastest to put right.

3. Was content removed?

Redesigns are often also a tidy-up. Pages that looked thin or outdated get deleted, long pages get shortened to look cleaner, and FAQ sections disappear because they were ugly.

Those pages may have been ranking. A page that looks unloved in a content audit can be the one answering a question hundreds of people search every month.

How to check. Compare your old top-50 landing pages against what exists now. Anything missing, or now substantially shorter, is a candidate.

How to fix it. Restore the content. If the page is genuinely obsolete, redirect it to the nearest equivalent rather than deleting it outright. Design tidiness is worth very little compared with a page that was bringing in enquiries.

4. Did the measurement break, or did the business?

Before assuming you lost customers, confirm you did not simply lose the ability to count them.

New sites frequently ship without the analytics tag, with a different property, or with conversion tracking pointing at a thank-you page that no longer exists. Consent banners are another common culprit: a stricter banner on the new site means fewer visitors accepted into analytics, and the resulting drop looks exactly like a traffic drop.

How to check. Compare something that does not depend on your analytics setup — Search Console clicks, phone call volume, your inbox, the CRM. If those held steady while analytics fell, your problem is measurement, not marketing.

We would argue this check belongs in any monthly review rather than only after a launch, for reasons set out here.

5. Do the forms still work?

The cruellest version of this problem. Traffic is fine, rankings are fine, and enquiries are near zero because the contact form posts into nothing.

How to check. Send yourself one, from a phone, on mobile data, as an outsider would. Then check it arrived — including the spam folder. Repeat for every route: each form, the phone number link, the WhatsApp link, the email address.

Do this now, before reading on. It takes two minutes and it is the single most common silent failure we find on new sites.

What this usually costs

Caught within a month and fixed properly, a redesign drop is normally a full recovery. Rankings return as redirects are processed and content is restored, and the cost is a few days of work plus the enquiries missed in between.

Left for six months, it is worse. Competitors move into the positions you left empty, old links decay, and some of the accumulated signal genuinely does not come back. The recovery becomes a rebuild rather than a repair.

The difference between those two outcomes is entirely how quickly somebody checks.

Doing the next one without this happening

The pattern is avoidable, and it is not expensive to avoid. Map every old address to its new one before design starts rather than in launch week. Keep the content that earns. Test the forms before launch, not after. Take a full export of rankings, top pages and conversion rates the week before you go live, so that "is it worse?" is a question with an answer.

That mapping work is part of how we handle site builds and migrations, and the recovery work above is ordinary technical SEO.

If your enquiries dropped after a launch and you would rather somebody just found the cause, send us the site and we will tell you which of the five it is — usually within a day, and often it is the first one.