Delia Online relaunch slices her traffic in half 1
The relaunch of Delia Online has cost Delia Smith half her web traffic in the last 4 weeks, according to stats from Alexa.
Any relaunch or redesign can cost you traffic from Google as it tries to work out what's gone on. But as I explained here and here, Delia Smith's relaunch involved no-nos such as deleting all the old forum posts (dumping 000s of indexed pages) and failing to do any redirects from old URLs to new one (sacrificing all the benefits of inbound links to the old pages - so instead of appearing first for a search on Eton Mess, for instance, Delia is now nowhere).
Here is the proof of what this has cost her - the relaunch was in the last week of June, so watch for changes in the graphs at that point.
Delia's traffic halves
This first graph shows the %age of all pageviews that were from deliaonline.com. You can just about see them trail off in the last month.
And this second one is a bit clearer, it shows reach - the %age of all internet users who visited delia's site. As you can see, it's gone from an average of just under .004% until the relaunch at the end of June when it plummets to just under .002%.
Is site usage up?
You might be able to glean some good news from the stats - but you can't, trust me.
This looks promising. Pageviews per user initially went up after the relaunch (but then fell again).
Even better, the bounce rate - the %age of users who only look at one page - is down (but this fall seems to predate the relaunch...)
However, this is all a bit illusory, as time on the site is down. People are clearly having a quick look round - maybe looking for the deleted pages - and then leaving (more quickly than they used to).
If you have a redesign, make sure you learn the lessons from this one ...
Have a lot of time on your hands, Malc? 8^)