The redesign launched. The rankings didn’t survive it.
Three weeks ago the new site went live. It looks better, loads faster, and everyone was proud of it — until the organic traffic chart turned into a ski slope. Now the developer says everything was done correctly, the agency says give it time, and every Monday the Search Console graph is a little worse than the Friday before.
Here’s what nobody in that conversation is telling you: “give it time” only works if nothing is broken. If something is broken — and after a traffic collapse, something almost always is — time doesn’t heal it. Time compounds it. Google is recrawling your new site right now and re-learning it with every error left in place.
Migrations don’t fail mysteriously. They fail in predictable places.
After two decades of running my own ecommerce site through redesigns, replatforms, and one genuine disaster, I can tell you the same handful of failures cause nearly every post-migration collapse:
Redirects that were never mapped. Old URLs die, their authority dies with them, and years of accumulated rankings evaporate page by page.
Indexation directives that shipped from staging. A single leftover noindex tag or a robots.txt rule copied from the development server can quietly remove entire sections of your site from Google.
Structured data that vanished in the rebuild. Product schema, review markup, organization data — gone, along with the rich results that depended on them.
Internal links pointing at pages that no longer exist. Your site’s own architecture now tells Google the important pages don’t matter.
Templates that changed what Google reads. Title tags, headings, and content that ranked for years, rewritten or removed by a designer who was never told they mattered.
None of this shows up by browsing the site. All of it shows up in the data.
I’m not guessing. I lived this.
For 21 years I owned and operated a multimillion-dollar ecommerce business. I wasn’t the client reviewing an agency’s slide deck — I was the operator with revenue, payroll, and two decades of accumulated rankings riding on every technical decision.
When a rebuild of my own site went wrong, I watched the traffic I’d spent years earning start to drain away, week after week. There was no one to escalate to. I diagnosed it myself — Search Console data, crawl comparisons, redirect audits — found what broke, fixed it, and clawed the rankings back.
That experience is the entire basis of this service. Not a certification. Not a course. A survived disaster, and the diagnostic discipline that came out of it.
The process: diagnose first, fix second.
Step 1 — Free discovery call (30 minutes)
Before we talk, I review what’s publicly visible about your site — crawl data, ranking history, backlink profile. On the call, you tell me what happened and when. By the end, you’ll know whether your situation fits this service, and I’ll tell you plainly if it doesn’t.
Step 2 — The diagnostic (1 week, fixed fee, paid upfront)
A traffic collapse can’t be responsibly diagnosed from the outside — the answers live in your Search Console and analytics data. You grant me read-only access, and within five business days you receive a written diagnostic report: what broke, the evidence, and a prioritized recovery roadmap ordered by impact. The report is yours to keep either way.
Step 3 — The recovery
Hand the roadmap to your developer and implement it yourselves, or engage me to execute and verify the fixes. Either path is a clean outcome — the diagnostic stands on its own.
How I work
Engagements are scoped in writing, priced by deliverable, and paid upfront — the same way I ran my own company for 21 years. Communication is over email and scheduled calls, and you’ll always know what’s being done and why. If your situation isn’t a fit, I’ll say so on the discovery call and point you somewhere better.
Questions I hear on every discovery call:
How long does recovery take?
It depends on how much broke and how long it’s been broken. Some fixes — a bad robots.txt rule, a noindex tag — start showing improvement within days of Google recrawling. Redirect and authority repairs typically take weeks to months to fully register. What I can promise is that the diagnostic tells you exactly what’s wrong within five business days; recovery speed follows from what we find.
Will my rankings come back completely?
Often, yes — especially when the collapse came from technical errors and we catch them within a few months. The longer broken signals sit, the more Google re-learns your site the wrong way, and some competitive positions may need to be re-earned. I’ll give you an honest read on your specific situation during the diagnostic, not a blanket guarantee.
Should we just roll back to the old website?
Usually no — and sometimes it’s no longer possible. A rollback creates a second migration with its own risks, and most collapses can be fixed forward faster than they can be unwound. It’s occasionally the right call for a very recent launch with a catastrophic error, and if that’s your situation, I’ll tell you on the discovery call.
How do I know it was the migration and not a Google penalty or algorithm update?
Timing and evidence. A drop that starts at your launch date points one direction; a drop that lines up with a documented Google update points another. They also leave different fingerprints in Search Console. Separating the two is one of the first things the diagnostic settles — and if it turns out to be a penalty, that’s a problem I also handle.
What do you need from me?
Read-only access to Google Search Console and your analytics, and the ability to crawl your site. That’s enough for the full diagnostic. I don’t need admin control of anything, and you’re not locked into using me for the fixes.
Can our existing developer implement the fixes?
Yes — the diagnostic report is written so your developer can execute it: what broke, the evidence, and the fixes in priority order. Plenty of clients take the roadmap in-house. If you’d rather I execute and verify the fixes myself, that’s the recovery engagement.
What does this cost?
The discovery call is free. The diagnostic is a fixed fee, quoted before we start and paid upfront — no hourly meters, no surprises. Recovery work, if you want me for it, is scoped in writing as its own engagement. You’ll know every number before you commit to anything.
Your rankings aren’t coming back on their own.
Every week of guessing is a week added to your recovery. Thirty minutes tells you whether this is fixable and what fixing it looks like.
Book a Free 30-Minute Discovery Call Questions first? Feel free to Contact Us.