You updated your site, it really does look better, and yet there are fewer leads from Google. Most of the time the cause is not the design itself. A site move usually breaks two things you cannot see on screen: the page addresses Google sends people to, and the code that counts your leads. Below is the order of checks once the new site is live: what to look at, in what sequence, and what an owner can do alone, without a programmer.
What to ask your developer before launch we covered separately: “Website Redesign: 4 Questions for Your Developer Before Launch”. This article is about something else: leads have already dropped and you need to understand why. We checked the site-move rules and the names in Google’s help pages on 5 November 2026. Menu labels can vary a little between versions of the interface.
1. First, find the date things broke
Open Google Ads and look at leads for the last 30 days, day by day. Find the day they fell, or the last day a lead was still recorded. Now compare it with the launch date of the new site. This is the most valuable piece of information: a match by date almost always points to the cause, and if several weeks passed between launch and the drop, it is worth looking for other causes too (this is our practical rule of thumb, not a Google rule).
The second step is the same as in the article “Leads in the Report Fell Overnight, but Sales Did Not”: compare the ad report with real orders and calls for the same days. If orders have dropped too, the ads or the site really are working worse. If orders keep coming but the report shows almost no leads, the tracking broke. That article also explains how to find the conversion status in your account, so we do not repeat it here.
2. Open the old addresses on your phone
A page address (URL) is what Google uses to recognise a page. People arrive from search through old links that Google still remembers. If on the new site /uslugi/remont/ became /services/repair/ and the old address leads nowhere, the visitor sees “page not found” (a 404 error) and goes to a competitor.
What to do yourself. Open Google on your phone and find your site with two or three queries your customers use. Tap your pages in the results. Each one should open. Check separately the page that brought the most leads before the update. If some addresses from search return an error, you have found the cause.
3. Is there a redirect map
The right solution when addresses change is a permanent redirect (a 301) from each old address to the matching new one. It is an instruction for the browser and for search: “this page now lives here.” What Google’s help page on moving a site with URL changes advises:
- map old URLs to new ones and set up server-side redirects according to that table;
- avoid chains (old → intermediate → new): redirect straight to the final address;
- keep redirects for as long as possible, generally at least a year;
- pages that no longer exist on the new site should honestly return a 404 or 410 error, not send everyone to the home page.
Practitioners (agencies that run online shops) add smaller points: after a redesign, duplicate pages often appear because of a trailing slash (with and without it), and old redirects need to point to the new addresses too, otherwise they return 404 as well. This is practice, not a Google requirement, but the check is short.
What to do yourself. If you did not save a list of old addresses before launch, take it from your sitemap your-site-address/sitemap.xml (not every site has one) or from Google Search Console, from the search performance section that shows pages that earned impressions and clicks. Open the ten most important old addresses. Every one of them must land on the matching new page, rather than a 404 error or the home page. Ask your developer: is there an “old address → new address” table, and where is it?
4. Did the tracking code get lost
For ad platforms, a lead is registered through a tag: a piece of code on the site that tells Google a person submitted an enquiry. During a move it is often not put on the new version, or the enquiry is now sent differently (another form, another “Thank you” page) while the tag waits for the old one. Then the leads exist, but the ads do not see them. Which codes and forms should be on the site is described in “What Should Be Connected to Your Website”.
Why this is dangerous specifically for advertising. Smart bidding in Google Ads trains on whatever leads your tracking feeds into it. With no leads, it does not know which people to show ads to and acts almost at random. Google’s help page on performance fluctuations says something similar: a sharp drop in the firing of the tag that an automated strategy relies on can hurt impressions and spend.
What to do yourself. Send a test enquiry from your phone and see whether it reaches your email or CRM. Then check the conversion status in Google Ads, as described in the tracking article (link above).
5. A separate catch: a redirect can eat the click identifier
When a person clicks an ad, a technical click identifier (gclid) is added to the address, which Google later uses to link the click to a lead. Google’s Tag Manager help describes the problem like this: if the server drops this parameter during a redirect, the click will not be associated with any future conversions. The example in the help page: an address with the identifier redirects to another page without it. The fix: make the redirect pass the parameter on.
For an owner this means: if your ads point to addresses that now redirect (instead of to the new ones directly), leads may stop being attributed to the ads even though the site works. It is hard to check yourself: this is a job for whoever runs the site. Give them this sentence: “Check whether the redirects from the old addresses that our ads point to keep the gclid parameter.” The simplest solution: update the final URLs in your ads to the new addresses so that no redirect is needed at all.
6. Search Console: pages with errors
Google Search Console is a free service where Google shows how it sees your site. If it is not connected, ask whoever runs the site to connect it and give you access. It has the Page indexing report. In it Google lists pages that did not get into search and the reasons, including:
- “Not found (404)”: Google requests a page and it is not there. If important old addresses end up here, they need redirects;
- “Redirect error”: a redirect is set up but broken, for example looping;
- “Soft 404”: the page opens but shows nothing useful, so Google treats it as an error.
Google’s help page on moving a site advises watching the changes: the number of indexed old URLs should gradually fall while the new ones rise.
7. And the ads: do they lead to live pages?
Check separately where the ads themselves lead. If the final URL returns a 404, the ad is disapproved under the Google Ads policy “Destination not working”. After you fix it, save the ad so it goes for re-review. The ad quietly disappears from results and spends nothing, which makes it easy to miss for several days. What to do yourself: open an ad in your account and tap its final URL on your phone. Did the right page open, with the same price and offer as in the ad text?
What counts as normal and what counts as an error
Here sources disagree and we will not choose for you. Google’s help page on moving a site says a medium-sized site may need a few weeks for the new URLs to gradually appear in search, and a large one longer; it gives no exact figure. Practitioners give timeframes differently: agency blogs mention “from three weeks to a month.” So a slight dip in the first weeks after launch is not necessarily an error.
But there is a difference. If leads fell by a third and are gradually coming back, that can be normal. If leads stopped on launch day, old addresses return 404 and your account shows a yellow or red conversion status, that is not waiting, it is an error to fix now. How many missed leads will come back, Google does not promise: in our practice, what was not counted at the moment of the breakage usually does not return to the report.
From our practice
We advise owners one habit: write down the number of leads and calls for the month before launch and keep the list of old addresses. Then after launch you have something to compare with, and your developer has something to check redirects against. Without these two things it all comes down to “it feels worse to me.”
Summary
- Find the date leads broke in your account and compare it with the launch day.
- Open your pages from Google search on your phone: old addresses must not return “page not found.”
- Ask where the “old address → new address” table is and whether the 301 redirects work.
- Send a test enquiry and check the conversion status in the account.
- Ask someone to check that redirects do not lose the gclid click identifier, and update the final URLs in your ads.
- Look in Search Console at pages with errors.
The whole check takes an evening. The list of pre-launch questions is in the article on website redesign, and how we run ads when a site changes is in the section on search advertising.
Want a free audit of your Google Ads account? Send us a request: we will check where your ads lead after the site update and whether leads are being counted.