How the site lost positions after the redesign

Recent situation: worked with a small local website selling designer furniture.

The project is stable, traffic was growing moderately, leads were there. The client decided to update the design - to modernize and visually lighten the catalog.

The redesign was given to a competent person, and I was chillin' and imagining what a cool case study would come out: the numbers are good, traffic is coming, and it will look like a candy.

But a couple weeks after the rollout, I saw an unpleasant graph: the core had sagged for almost all commercial queries.

And it was not a sharp collapse, but a gradual decline downward by 3-7 positions in high-frequency.

Started pulling logs, seeing how the patterns changed.

At first glance everything is ok, but you can see that it's as if the ranking system started to doubt the relevance of key categories.

This was especially true for sofas and cabinets, the main money pages that generated the most profit.

I concluded that after the redesign, the site as if ceased to satisfy some of the previous signals. But I haven't yet realized which one.

I'll stop here. I'll tell you later where it got a little messy.