Do I revert back to original design of page after redesign tanked search results?

[WellCrafted]

I haven't had this happen before, so I would greatly appreciate some advice.

I helped with a redesign of a webiste, moving from Squarespace to Shopify. The data below is from their top-performing page that was a TOTALLY NEW page for their website, but has a tool on it that is very helpful. From its launch date, it was climbing in rankings on a national basis right off the bat, which is great because they are a local businesses that is adding ecommerce.

The client, seeing the great performance, wanted some tweaks done to the page. Designer made updates on July 6 and the page started tanking right away.

The designer made several changes by added some features, but the one I think was the clencher was they accidentally deleted the H1 header when changing the top banner. (!!)

I caught the missing header around 8/23 and had it added back in. But instead of improving, the page traffic and position DROPPED FURTHER.

For this keyword search, there is also a new "AI Overview: Key things to know" that was not there before (I'm not sure when it started appearing) but now it makes it so there's only 1 organic search result and then this lengthy AI box...so I think this is a contributor as well.

I'm afraid to tweak it more because every time we touch it, it drops. Do I give it a few weeks and not touch it? I also could revert the page back to the original design as that design still exists...but again, I'm afraid I'd hurt more than I'd help with another change.

Any thoughts or advice? It kills me we lost all this traffic and dropped from an average position of 6 to 9!

Thank you!

 

[localruler]

Yeah, that H1 missing for a month and a half could have been the culprit. Without any other insights, I would leave it a while longer to see what happens.

Something else to think about: You showed the data for the page as a whole. Have you looked at the individual keywords that the page was ranking for. Have all of them dropped? Was there one keyword that was getting most of the traffic and it dropped?

 

[fisicx]

The reasons for the fall could be multiple. The missing H1 may well have contributed but small changes to the layout can have a big impact. For example, adding an image with the wrong alt text when seen in context with the surrounding text can cause a fall in ranking. This is because Google looks at the whole page and how it works as a single entity and how it fits in with the rest of the site.

Can you show us the page and the keywords for which it was ranking.