Huge ranking and traffic loss from 13 October 2016

[vanilla38]

Hello guys, I'm the owner of <snip>.

The website was getting like 200 - 230k unique sessions a day and was ranked #2 for the <snip> keyword in France for a complete year.

I changed my design on October 13 and there was some issues for 2 weeks with some people's cache, I fixed them but I lost 4 ranks on most of my Google top keywords searches and like 60 unique sessions a day, and I think it's related to the bounce rate which had increased alot between these 2 issue weeks.

Now everything is ok, I still lose a little traffic everyday and I dont know if I will manage to get my ranking back someday :/

Maybe someone of you may explain me how to deal with that or inspect my new design and tell me if there is something wrong I missed regarding SEO.

Thanks for helping,
Réda Allali.

[edited by: goodroi at 5:41 pm (utc) on Nov 28, 2016]
[edit reason] Welcome to WebmasterWorld, please no specifics :) [/edit]

[goodroi]

When you changed the design did you also change the text on the page or the urls of your site? Have you been checking you analytics to see if the design is showing better or worse usage stats like conversions, time on site, pages per visit and bounce rate?

[vanilla38]

Hello, thanks for your reply, text and urls remains unchanged and the html structure is pretty the same as before.

About analytics, as I said, bounce rate and time on site have been affected because of some cache issues for two weeks but it's now stable and the same as before, but I still lost alot of ranking.

[yawermalik]

What step you did while transferring site? were there any staging version and you worked on staging and then move to live? did you off your site for a time?

[vanilla38]

I made a fully functional new design, tested it for a month locally, then transferred it but I realised js, css and images were cached on most of my users browsers, I finally fixed that by adding a versionning to the external ressources URLs 2 weeks after the upload.
,