Will a New Website Hurt Our Google Rankings? Yes, For About 30 to 60 Days

Yes, there is usually a dip. Plan for 30 to 60 days, and tell your operations team 90 so nobody panics in week three.

That range is not ours. It comes from Mike Whaling at 30 Lines, a multifamily marketing firm, writing about when to launch apartment websites:

Even with all the preparation and planning for things like SEO redirects, you'll typically see an organic traffic dip for about 30-60 days after you launch a new site. (Manage expectations here. To be safe, tell your Ops team that traffic will dip for 90 days.)

We are quoting a competitor because the number is right and because you should hear it from somebody with no reason to soften it. Most vendors will not raise this at all, which is exactly why it ambushes projects at the approval stage.

Why it happens

Search engines have an index of your old site. New URLs, new page structure, and new content mean they have to recrawl and re-evaluate. Even with everything done correctly, that takes weeks. It is not a sign anything is broken. It is the cost of the move.

What determines whether the dip is 30 days or six months is entirely how the migration is handled.

What actually shortens it

These are the things to require of any vendor, ours included, in writing before you sign:

• A one-to-one redirect map. Every existing URL points to its replacement. Not everything dumped onto the homepage, which is the single most common way this goes wrong.
• Keep the URLs that already rank. If a floor plan page has ranked for two years, its address should not change without a reason.
• A fresh sitemap submitted at launch, not a month later.
• Direct notification to the search engines. There is a protocol called IndexNow that tells Bing about changed URLs immediately rather than waiting to be crawled. It is free and most vendors do not bother.
• Keep the content that earned the rankings. A redesign that quietly deletes half the text is not a redesign, it is a reset.

Do not launch on a Friday

Same source, and it is the kind of operational detail that only comes from having done this:

It's never a great idea to launch new sites or software on a Friday (or anywhere close to the 1st of the month ... you need your systems working without fail when it's time to collect rent).

If something goes wrong with a portal link on the 1st, you will spend the day answering phone calls about rent instead of fixing the site. Launch mid-week and mid-month.

The timing argument for starting now

If the dip is real, then the worst time to launch is right before your busiest leasing season. Which means the decision has to happen earlier than most people plan for. From the same article, addressed to operators writing next year's budgets: "I know you're submitting your budgets for money that you plan to spend in 2025, but this is one instance where it's best to give yourself a slight head start."

The same logic holds for a lease-up, where the site needs to be established well before the units are ready, and for a management takeover, where the clock starts the day you get the keys.

The paragraph to paste into your approval email

Steal this, change the numbers, and put it in the request yourself rather than waiting for it to come back at you as an objection:

Organic traffic typically dips for 30 to 60 days after a site launch, and we should plan for up to 90. The vendor will provide a one-to-one redirect map for every existing URL, preserve the page addresses that currently rank, and submit an updated sitemap at launch. We will schedule the launch mid-week and away from the first of the month so rent collection is unaffected.

An approver who hears the risk from you, with the mitigation attached, is being asked to approve a plan. An approver who discovers it later is being asked to forgive a surprise. Those are very different conversations.

One related warning

If you are also changing property management software, the portal address changes with it, and that has its own consequence. A property management website company put it plainly: "When the portal URL changes and nobody warns them, you get a flood of calls and a wave of anxiety that damages the trust you've built." Tell your residents before, not after.

Sources

• Mike Whaling, 30 Lines, "When to Launch New Apartment Websites." 30lines.com
• PropertyManagerWebsites, guide to switching property management software. propertymanagerwebsites.com