New Website
SEO Issues

If your website is moving to another CMS as part of a new website rebuild then there is a greater chance that the replatform is going to have some fundamental changes that could impact the new websites performance - this will depend on lots of factors from the target CMS or platform technology through to navigation, internal links, rendering, canonicals - any changes can potentially have a medium to large impact on rankings.

if your new website is also going through a domain change this is likely to have a much bigger impact, especially if not done properly. We can provide support pre and post new website launch + domain change. Generally all the configuration should be done PRIOR to go live to minimise potential ranking impact or losses.

Usually a domain change on its own is fairly benign if done properly & if the target domain hasn’t been subject to abuse, historic spam issues etc. For this to go smoothly the redirections, internal links, property management all needs doing properly.

IF however you are having a new website built and are changing domains at the same time, this is usually a little more complex and requires both an audit of the existing sites performance, indexing as well as a crawl and review of the target website & analysis of the target domain.

If your new website is a complete rebuild with things such as design & content overhauls than there is generally more risk involved. Usually when making lots of changes during a website change, it can be harder to isolate or pin down “which” specific changes lead to a decline or ranking issues.

This is why we advocate getting a pre-site launch audit which covers an analysis of your old website, analysis of your new website and ensures that the transition is likely to be beneficial as opposed to being detrimental.

• Staging sites are correctly blocked during build (Disallow: / or noindex), but the directives remain after go-live
• Result: Google cannot crawl or index the new site property, often with rapid deindexing and near-total organic visibility loss until fixed

This is one of the most catastrophic oversights because it is easy to catch with a quick post-launch check. A simple stray / in a robots.txt file can see a site be deindexed - whilst the impact is fairly sudden, recovery can take longer.

• Designers create “cleaner,” more visual pages with far less text, fewer headings, or deleted “outdated” blog/service pages that still drove traffic or links
• Sometimes designers can preserve content but integrate it into a page using Javascript that requires an interaction i.e. a button to load the content
• Heading hierarchy (H1/H2s) changes, internal linking is rebuilt without authority flow in mind, or high-performing content is discarded
• Result: Google sees reduced relevance and topical depth ranking drops even if URLs stay the same

Agency tendency: Prioritize modern aesthetics over the semantic signals that earned the rankings, minimalism is generally welcomed and can mean that proper content coverage isn’t properly factored into the design, which can and does have an impact on SEO.

• Lost or incorrect title tags, meta descriptions, canonical tags, structured data/schema, XML sitemaps (still pointing to staging or incomplete), and internal links, lots of internal redirect hops, inconsistent URL references, mis-configured HREFLANG etc.
• New templates can strip these elements or introduce duplicates, wrong canonicals, or JavaScript-heavy rendering issues that hinder crawling / indexing
• Result: Often indexation problems, lost rich results, diluted authority, and poorer understanding of page topics

• Navigation and information architecture are “tidied up” without mapping how search engines discover and value pages
• Important pages become harder to crawl or receive fewer internal links
• Result: Reduced crawl efficiency and loss of hierarchical signals

• Heavy images, unoptimized code, excessive JavaScript, or poor mobile experience introduced by the new design
• Even if the old site was mediocre, a new site that scores worse on Core Web Vitals can hurt rankings and user signals

• No pre-launch SEO baseline/audit of rankings, traffic, top pages, and keywords
• SEO not involved from the start (or only after design is locked)
• Launch without staging validation, incomplete sitemap submission, or no post-launch monitoring in Search Console
• Changing too many things at once (URLs + content + structure + domain) makes diagnosis impossible