Should we reinstate the old website?

[etienneb]

In a nut shell we had a great site that performed well and grew month on month but it perhaps looked a bit dated. A decision was taken to build a new site and the job given to a PR agency for some reason. All the titles, H1 tags, page content and url structure was changed and now the site has drop 50% of organic traffic. I've been tasked with trying to rebuild rankings but so far it's not going well.

A snapshot of the old website still exists and i'm very tempted to have it reinstated in the hopes that our traffic will recover. What are your thoughts?

[KevinBudzynski]

Were 301 redirects put in place? If so, was the content, more or less, the same? Was there specific pages that dropped in traffic and others stayed the same? Did you see anything in Search Console?

[Xiano]

If the refresh was just because the site looked dated, why was all the content updated?

A complete rebuild of the site seems a little drastic if it only needed a facelift. Were there other concerns?

As Kevin asked, were 301s set up? if there were no 301's set up, any previous links will no longer be passing juice, which could have a serious impact.

[EGOL]

The true answer to reinstating the old site depends upon the quality of work done on the many parts of the job by the PR agency.   If this was my site, and it was performing kickass before these PR guys got their hands on it, I would toss the old version back up and do a deeper assessment - because the results thus far suggest that the PR agency doesn't know much about SEO.

<kibitz>In the past few years a lot of PR agencies have become spammers who wear suits to work.</kibitz>