Yes. A redesign can wreck your SEO, and worse than most owners expect. One documented case lost almost half its organic traffic after deleting just 15 percent of its pages during a relaunch. Half, from cutting one page in seven. A redesign is meant to be a step up. For the pages that already rank, it's too often a step off a ledge nobody mentioned. If a redesign is on the calendar and nobody's asked what happens to the pages already pulling in visitors, that's the conversation worth having first.
Content breaks first. Redesigns tempt everyone to prune whatever looks old, and the pages that look old are often the ones already ranking. Cut one, and the ranking goes with it, along with the backlinks pointing at it and the internal links running through it. A page doesn't earn a reprieve for being recent. It earns one for having ever pulled in a search visitor. That's the bar before anything gets cut, not whatever looks tidy to the design team.
Second, the address book breaks. Change the URL structure without a 301 redirect mapped for every single old URL, and Google has to relearn the whole site from nothing. It's the most common mistake in a redesign, and the most fixable. A redirect map isn't a nice extra step tacked on at the end. It's the one non-negotiable piece of any redesign that touches URLs, full stop, and it needs a complete inventory of the old site before a single page changes.
Sometimes nothing technically breaks and rankings slide anyway. The old design happened to have the content structure, internal linking and page speed that made it rank, and the new one looks sharper while quietly doing less of that work underneath. Recovery has no fixed timeline either. It depends how much Google has to re-crawl and re-evaluate, and that can run from days to months. A redesign that changes only how the site looks is rare in practice. Ask what it's doing to the structure. Not just the surface.
The third failure is the quiet one. A noindex tag meant for the staging site survives into production, and the new site is invisible to Google the moment it goes live. Easy mistake. Embarrassing one. Entirely avoidable, and it happens on real launches often enough that it should be the first thing anyone checks if traffic vanishes the week a new site ships. Checking it takes minutes. Not checking it can cost months.
Redesigns tend to change content, design and URLs all at once. That's normal for a relaunch, and it's exactly what makes a drop hard to diagnose afterwards. Nobody can tell which change caused it, so the fix waits while everything gets checked in turn. The businesses that recover fastest are usually the ones who kept a record of what changed and when, so a drop traces to one decision instead of three.
What a studio actually does around a launch is that list, done in order, before the old site comes down: a full URL inventory, a redirect map covering every one of those URLs, a staging environment properly checked before go live, and an SEO pass run again the day the new site ships. A DIY relaunch skips most of it, because nobody on the team owns the list. If a redesign is coming and nobody has answered that ownership question yet, answer it before the site changes. Not after the traffic does.