I rebuilt my website in Node.js, and it died in Google. Here’s what I learned
By: Stuart Costen
Tags: Web Development, Software Development, Google Search, Nodejs, SEO

I rebuilt my website in Node.js, and it died in Google. Here’s what I learned Stuart Costen Follow Oct 27 · 11 min read

Photo by Nathana Rebouças on Unsplash

There is always a slight trepidation about putting a new website live, and for a good reason, it’s usually untested by anyone (or anything).

Now, I think I’m fairly OK with UX and UI. I understand a website should be easy to use, look good, and most of all, be interesting and engaging for the user.

I was fairly happy with the way my new site looked and worked.

So I pressed the Go Live button, and for a week or so everything was going great, then suddenly my website fell off a cliff.

Oh oh

Google’s Search Console performance graph began to head downwards, my website visits plummeted, and the contemplation to turn my old site back on was playing in the back of my mind.

But not one to take the easy route I decided to turn it into a challenge.

Google’s Search Console became a window to a world I’d seen on many an occasion but never stopped long enough to have a proper look round.

I also started investigating what techniques other websites, who were top of the rankings for keywords I used to rank for myself, were using.

After a month of tweaks, harsh lessons and hours spent checking Google for my chosen keywords, the performance graph is starting to rise, but I am by no means out of the woods...yet.

I’ve decided to share my findings and lessons I have learned along the way with you all, mainly so you don’t make the same mistakes I did, but also to give you a good indication that a small oversight can have long-lasting damaging effects.

But first, let's start at the beginning…

My WordPress website was clunky. It was loading slowly and failing miserably on Google’s page speed metrics.

Although still doing fairly well in Google’s SERP (Search Engine Results Pages), I was hungry for a faster website and one that was simpler to theme, so I settled on the technology I was going to use and started work. Having plenty of time during lockdown certainly helped.

Now, as a web developer by trade, I have the power to mould a website any way I choose. I find the usual issue with a CMS driven website is that the various plugins you install, and the general mechanics of way CMS’s are built, mean that some elements are out of your control, mainly how many stylesheets/scripts are referenced, the code under the hood being miswritten from a speed point of view, or lots of unnecessary stuff there to handle a plethora of situations that won’t happen with your setup.

This means that when you run the Lighthouse report in Chrome, it hates you.

My main pages were getting below 40 on the performance score out of 100.

Booooo

I’d read somewhere that Google was going to start using site speed as a ranking factor. So to give me a little edge over the competition, which most are sitting at below 40 for performance themselves, I decided to rebuild the site in NodeJs completely and set out employing all the page speed tactics I could find.

I yearned for a performance score over 90, and I wasn’t going to get that from my old WordPress site.

And so I did it. Built it, tested it and pushed it live.

Winner winner

And about 3 weeks in…that’s when the problems started.

I noticed a slight rise at first, as Google was probably noticing I’d made a change and showing its appreciation for updated content, but then I noticed my usually top 4 keywords were now falling on to page 2, and as you are probably aware page 2 might as well be page 100 for the amount of traffic you are going to get.

Panic set in, what have I done? I’ve taken my well-ranking website and shot it to pieces. And for what? Failure.

My first port of call, and quite rightly if you want to rank higher in Google, was Google Search Console.

Secondly, I had an old version of my website. I could cross-reference for data differences.

And thirdly, just doing searches in Google itself for keywords you want to rank for can reveal a lot more than Search Console can itself sometimes.

So, to the lessons.

I’m no SEO guru; I’ve no SEO qualifications; I have no cold-hard Google algorithm facts.

What I do have is anecdotal findings and musings of the past month of my life.

My site is starting to rise again in Google Search Console performance charts so I must be doing something right.

Phew

But as with any kind of SEO ‘tips and tricks’, what works for me, may not work for you and I have a few things on my side already that certainly help which I will explain later.

If you are building a fresh website with a brand new domain, you may not find anything I am writing about makes much of a difference.