Technical SEO & Core Web Vitals Recovery After a Redesign

The situation

A redesign usually changes more than the look of a website. URL patterns change, templates are rebuilt, a new JavaScript framework replaces the old CMS theme, and content is merged or dropped. If nobody owns search during the migration, the damage shows up weeks later: indexed pages disappear, rankings slide for terms the site used to own, and the marketing team cannot tell whether the cause is the redesign, an algorithm update or seasonality.

Teams in this situation need two things quickly: a clear diagnosis of what changed, and a set of fixes ordered by impact rather than by whichever tool reported the most warnings.

Our approach

1. Establish what changed

We crawl the current site with JavaScript rendering on and off, and compare it against the pre-launch URL inventory rebuilt from old sitemaps, analytics, backlink data and the Search Console export. This gives a page-by-page view of which URLs were removed, redirected, consolidated or left orphaned, and which ones lost clicks and impressions after launch.

2. Repair crawling and indexation

Every legacy URL with traffic or backlinks gets a mapped destination. We implement redirects as single-hop 301s at the CDN or server layer, remove redirect chains, fix canonical tags that point to the wrong version, and clean up sitemaps so they list only indexable, canonical pages. Soft 404s, parameter duplicates and accidental noindex directives are resolved at the template level so they do not come back.

3. Make content visible without JavaScript

When the main copy, headings or internal links only appear after client-side rendering, crawlers may index a thin version of the page. We move those templates to server-side rendering or static generation, with frameworks such as Astro or Next.js, so the first HTML response contains the content that matters. Interactive components still hydrate on the client, but they no longer hide the page from search engines.

4. Engineer for Core Web Vitals

We work from field data (Chrome UX Report and real-user monitoring), not only lab scores. For LCP, that usually means preloading the hero image, serving responsive AVIF or WebP from the CDN and removing render-blocking CSS. For INP, we break up long tasks, defer non-critical third-party scripts and reduce hydration cost. For CLS, we reserve space for images, embeds and fonts and stop late-loading banners from shifting the layout.

5. Add structure to content and markup

We group articles and resource pages into topic clusters, each with a pillar page and supporting pages that link to it and to each other. Overlapping pages are merged or differentiated so they stop competing. Templates emit Schema.org JSON-LD for organization, articles, breadcrumbs, FAQs and software products where it genuinely applies, and we validate it on every build.

6. Monitor so it does not happen again

Search Console data is exported daily to BigQuery, joined with crawl and performance data, and surfaced in Looker Studio dashboards with alerts for drops in indexed pages or clicks. Lighthouse CI runs performance budgets on every pull request, so a heavy new script or an unoptimized image is caught before it ships.

How we deliver it

The first two to three weeks produce a prioritized audit: each issue has an owner, an estimated effect and a fix. Redirects and indexation problems go first because they block everything else. Rendering and performance work follows in sprints, released gradually and checked against crawl results and field data after each release. Design changes, such as simpler hero layouts or lighter components, are handled with our web design team so the site still looks and works the way the brand intends.

Search engines take time to recrawl and reassess a site, so we set expectations honestly. We can fix the technical causes of lost visibility and make the site easier to crawl and faster to use, but no one can guarantee specific rankings.

Is this relevant to you?

If organic traffic dropped after a redesign or platform migration, or your Core Web Vitals report shows a growing number of poor URLs, this approach is a good fit. Explore our SEO services or talk to us about what changed on your site.