Keep the same property, get the tracking onto the new site before launch, map old addresses to new ones, and check within forty-eight hours that conversions are still recording.

Rebuilds break measurement

It is the single most common way a small business loses its analytics.

A new site is built by somebody who was not told about the tracking, or was told and put it on one template, or installed their own preferred setup alongside.

Nobody checks, because everybody is looking at the design and the content, and the site plainly works.

Weeks later somebody asks whether the new site is performing better, and the honest answer is that nobody can say, because the comparison was destroyed at launch.

Keep the same property

The most important decision and the one most often got wrong.

A new site does not need a new analytics property, and creating one throws away every comparison at exactly the moment you want one.

Use the existing property, with the existing history, so the before and after sit in one continuous series.

A new property is justified only when the domain changes or the business genuinely becomes a different thing, and even then there are usually better options.

Where a supplier proposes a fresh property because it is tidier, that tidiness costs you the only measurement that would show whether their work succeeded.

Before launch

The second is where it fails most often, since a template-based site can have three or four page types and tracking added to one of them looks correct on a homepage check.

The address mapping matters twice

Once for visitors and once for the comparison, and people plan only for the first.

Redirecting old addresses to new ones keeps links working, which everybody knows.

The second use is that your analytics history is organised by address, so a page that changes its address appears as a new page with no history and the old one appears to have died.

Which means a service page that was your best performer becomes two half-records, and the year-on-year comparison for it is impossible.

Keeping addresses unchanged where you can is the cheapest answer, and where they must change, recording the mapping in a spreadsheet lets you stitch the two halves together later.

That spreadsheet takes twenty minutes during the rebuild and is unreconstructable afterwards.

Check within forty-eight hours

The step that turns a silent failure into a ten-minute fix.

On the day after launch, open the real-time view and load the new site: the homepage, a service page, a blog post, and the contact page.

Confirm each registers, which catches the missing-template problem immediately.

Then submit the contact form and confirm the conversion records, since form handling is frequently rebuilt and the tracking around it rarely survives.

Do it again a week later, when the figures have accumulated enough to compare against the previous week, and look for anything that has fallen to zero.

A page type recording nothing is the signature of tracking missing from one template.

A worked example

A business relaunched their site and reported after two months that traffic had fallen by about sixty percent.

Their enquiries were slightly up.

The tracking had been added to the homepage and blog templates and omitted from the service page template, which was most of the site.

They had also changed every service page address, without a mapping, so the historical figures for those pages pointed at addresses that no longer existed.

Fixing the tracking took ten minutes. Reconstructing which old page corresponded to which new one took an afternoon of guesswork and was never fully reliable.

The lesson they drew was that the ten-minute problem was the visible one and the afternoon problem was the expensive one.

Baseline the things that will not survive

The export worth doing before the old site goes.

Your top twenty pages with their traffic and conversions, for the last twelve months.

Your traffic sources, monthly, for the same period.

Your conversion totals by month.

And a note of the conditions: what you were spending, what was seasonal, anything unusual.

Those four take half an hour and mean that even if the analytics continuity is broken, you hold the numbers that matter in a form nobody can lose.

They are also what you will be asked for when somebody wants to know whether the rebuild was worth it.

Agree who is responsible

A contractual point that prevents the common outcome.

Put it in writing before the work starts: the builder is responsible for the tracking being present and working on every page type at launch, and for confirming it.

That is a reasonable requirement, costs them very little, and converts a diffuse assumption into somebody's job.

Ask for confirmation in writing at handover, alongside whatever else is being confirmed.

Where a builder is unwilling to take that on, do the check yourself on the day, which is the fallback rather than the plan.

The counter-case

Continuity can be over-valued.

A genuinely different site, with a different structure and different content, is not comparable to its predecessor in any meaningful way, and an unbroken chart across the change implies a comparability that does not exist.

There are also situations where a fresh property is right: a domain change, a business that has become something else, or a property so badly configured that carrying it forward carries the problems too.

And spending a day protecting analytics continuity for a brochure site that produces four enquiries a month is disproportionate.

Keep the property, get the tracking on every template, and export the baseline. Those three cover most of the value in about an hour.

Before and after

  1. Keep the existing property.
  2. Give the builder the tracking details in writing.
  3. Require it on every template, confirmed at handover.
  4. Keep addresses unchanged where you can.
  5. Record the mapping where they must change.
  6. Export a baseline before the old site goes.
  7. Check every page type within forty-eight hours.

Step five is the one that cannot be done afterwards, since nobody can reconstruct which old address became which new one once the old site is gone.

Recording where you started is covered in setting a baseline you can compare to.

Frequently asked questions

Why do rebuilds break analytics?

Because the tracking is added by somebody who was not told about it, or put on one template only, and nobody checks while everybody is looking at the design.

Should a new site get a new property?

No. Creating one throws away every comparison at the moment you want one. Use the existing property so before and after sit in a continuous series.

Why does address mapping matter for analytics?

Because history is organised by address. A page that changes address appears as a new page with no history while the old one appears to have died, splitting your best performer in two.

When should I check after launch?

Within forty-eight hours, loading each page type and submitting the form, then again a week later looking for anything that has fallen to zero.

What should I export beforehand?

Top twenty pages with traffic and conversions for twelve months, monthly traffic sources, conversion totals by month, and a note of the conditions. Half an hour.

Whose responsibility is it?

Put it in writing that the builder is responsible for tracking being present and working on every page type at launch, and for confirming it at handover.

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.

Rebuild starting soon?

Write down which old address becomes which new one. That mapping takes twenty minutes now and cannot be reconstructed later.

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