Did your website redesign break your conversion tracking?

Tracking is attached to the specific pages, elements, and structure of your old site — and a redesign changes all three. The most common failures leave no visible trace:

None of these show up when you look at the new site. The pages load, the forms appear, the buttons work — and because pageviews often keep flowing (the base tag survived while the events didn't), analytics looks alive. The events that carry business meaning — the purchase, the lead, the conversion — are the ones that quietly stop.

The result is a gap between what the site appears to do and what it actually measures. Campaigns keep optimizing against events that no longer fire, and the damage compounds silently across every reporting period until someone notices the numbers are wrong.

The thorough check is from inside your accounts: open GTM Preview, run a test conversion, and watch the event land in GA4 realtime or Meta Events Manager. That's the right way to confirm a specific event fires, and it's worth doing after any redesign — but it needs account access and a test action for each tag.

Before that, a faster first pass is from the outside: paste the public URL of a redesigned page into a scanner and see whether the tracking tags (GA4, GTM, Meta, Google Ads) and the lead paths (forms, buttons, WhatsApp) still appear to load. If a tag that used to be there is no longer visible on the new page, that's your first lead — you've found the break before spending on a test action or waiting for a lead dip to reveal it.

TrackCanary runs that outside check: paste a URL, and it reviews whether the tracking signals and lead paths appear to load on the public page. It does not prove a conversion fires — that still needs GTM Preview or a test action — but it tells you fast whether the redesign appears to have dropped a signal, and where to look.

A redesign is the single highest-risk moment for tracking, so treat it like a launch. Before you point ad budget at the new site, walk through the tags and lead paths deliberately rather than assuming they carried over.

The checklist below is honest about the split that trips most people up: some things you can verify from the outside (does the tag appear to load, is the form still there), and some need account access (does the event actually fire, does the value come through). Doing the outside pass first tells you where to spend the inside effort.

A redesign isn't the only time tracking breaks — the next theme update, plugin change, or template edit can do the same thing, just as silently. Checking once after the launch fixes today's problem but not the next one.

That's the case for monitoring rather than one-time checks: watch the pages that carry your conversions and be told when a signal that used to be there is no longer visible, instead of finding out weeks later from a lead dip. It doesn't replace a proper in-account test — it's the early-warning layer around it. For an agency running several client sites, that outside watch is the difference between catching a client's broken tag first and hearing about it from the client.