During a website rescue for a small business west of Munich, more went wrong in the first few days than we would have liked. A trades business near Olching got in touch in the spring. The site barely loaded on a phone, half the content was missing, and on Google the company had dropped off page one for its own town name. Instead of the usual before-and-after success story, we'll tell you honestly what we misjudged at the start and how the move still came off in the end without a drop in rankings.
What was actually broken on the old website?
Short answer: several things at once, and none of them obvious. The site ran on an old WordPress install with fourteen plugins, half of which hadn't seen an update in two years. A slider plugin was blocking the page from rendering, a cache plugin was serving outdated prices, and the contact form was sending enquiries into a black hole. The owner had no idea he was losing enquiries. He just thought nobody was getting in touch anymore.
That was the first moment we went quiet for a second. For months, real customer enquiries had been trickling away into a broken form. If you've seen this before, you'll recognise the pattern from our piece on trades websites where the contact form quietly fails. It's alarmingly common.
What did we get wrong at first?
Our first plan was too optimistic. We figured we'd clean up the plugins, update the system, swap a few texts, and call it done. Two days in, it was clear the foundation no longer held. The database had filled up over the years with junk from uninstalled plugins, and the theme had been hacked about so much that every change broke something somewhere else.
So we changed direction. Rebuild instead of repair. That decision isn't easy for anyone, because at first glance it looks like more work. But you don't just repaint a house with a rotten roof frame. We've written separately about how a rebuild like this works in practice, in case that's useful: how we build a small-business website in ten days.
The second misjudgement was about the content. We assumed it was reasonably current. Going through it, we found opening hours from 2021, a former employee still on the team page, and services the business had stopped offering long ago. Stale details like that cost trust, and Google remembers outdated signals for a surprisingly long time.
How did the move happen without losing rankings?
This is where it got tricky. Despite all its technical problems, the old site had built up solid rankings for local search terms over the years. That visibility couldn't be lost in the move. The key to that is clean redirects. Every old URL has to point to its new counterpart via a 301 redirect, or Google and your visitors both walk into a dead end.
We started by exporting the entire old URL structure. Forty pages, plus a handful of old blog articles and PDF files that were still linked. For each one we mapped the target on the new site. So far, so tidy. And then came the afternoon I won't forget in a hurry.
After going live, the rankings for one important search term crashed. Overnight. We sat on the debugging, checked the redirects, and everything seemed to line up. Only after hours did it click: a single old URL, the services page with the most backlinks, had a hyphen in its path on the old site that we'd missed in the redirect list. One forgotten redirect. Google had logged the page as a 404 and penalised the business for it. We added the redirect, waited two days, and the ranking came back. One character, one whole afternoon.
We wrote down the lesson. You don't just check a redirect list against the sitemap, but against the real backlink data from Search Console. If you want to check something like this yourself, our overview of SEO audits with free tools will help.
What did the business actually get out of it?
Three weeks after going live, visibility was back to where it had been, and higher in several places. But the more important thing was less spectacular. The contact form worked, and in the first full week four real enquiries came in. The owner called and asked, half joking, whether we'd filled the form in by hand. No, we hadn't.
- Load time on mobile down from around nine seconds to under two
- Current opening hours, services and team across every page
- Working enquiries instead of silent data loss
- Local rankings back, plus two new terms from the surrounding area
What we learned along the way lines up with the observations from our review of five small-business websites. The technical problems are rarely the real story. The real story is that nobody noticed how much business was quietly slipping away.
What should you take away as a small business?
Check your contact form. Today, send yourself a test enquiry. It sounds trivial, but it's the most common silent failure we see. Second: an old site with good rankings is worth more than it looks. A move without clean redirects burns years of hard-won visibility in a matter of days. And third, less technical: honesty on a project saves time. When we told the client early on that a repair wouldn't be enough, he was disappointed at first and glad in the end.
If you're planning a rescue like this, it's worth a look at our web design and the SEO work behind it. On a move, the two belong together, or you save the looks and lose the rankings.
Frequently asked questions
Do you always lose rankings when you move a website?
No, not if the redirects are right. Every old URL needs a 301 redirect to the matching new page. Check the list against your backlink data in Search Console, not just against the sitemap. One forgotten redirect on a heavily linked page is enough to cause a noticeable drop.
Repair or rebuild, which is cheaper?
It depends on the state of things. A tidy system with outdated texts, you repair. A site with a hacked-about theme, a dead database and a dozen old plugins, you rebuild, or you'll pay for the repair twice. An honest condition check before the quote saves a lot of money here.
How do I tell my site is losing business?
Fewer enquiries for no obvious reason, slow load times on mobile, and a slide in Google search for your own company name are the clearest signs. A quick test of the contact form exposes the most common silent failure straight away.
Suspect your site is costing you business? We'll take a look for free. In a 30-minute check we go over load time, contact form and your local visibility, and tell you honestly whether a repair is enough or a rebuild makes more sense. No sales pressure at all. Drop us a quick line and we'll get back to you from Fuerstenfeldbruck.