There’s a famous saying about trust: “It comes on foot and leaves on horseback.” It means trust takes a long time to build up but can break very quickly. Unfortunately, this adage applies to SEO value on websites, too. SEO value takes a long time to build and can be lost in an instant.
The most common time SEO value dips is during a web migration. Websites often end up with a fraction of their organic search trafficpost-migration. The good news is there are ways to prevent this before migration. And if you move fast enough, you can even recover lost traffic after migration.
What is a website migration?
A website migration is the process of moving a website from one environment to another. A migration is a crucial time for a website because it means a level of structural change to the site. These structural changes can put a site’s SEO value at risk.
There are many different types of migration. The most common types of migrations are:
- Platform: Moving a site from one content management system (CMS) to another, such as from WordPress to Shopify or from Joomla to Squarespace.
- Content or design: Doing a complete overhaul of the site’s look and feel.
- Domain: Changing the site’s root domain, such as from ecommerce.biz to ecommerce.com, or from yoursite.com to mysite.com.
- Host: Moving where the site is actually hosted, such as from GoDaddy to BlueHost.
At times, these migrations happen together. For example, many businesses choose to redesign their website and change platforms to better support the goals of the redesign.
Why would traffic drop after a web migration?
The number one reason websites lose traffic after migration is a loss of organic search result rankings. If a site migration’s changes aren’t made with Google in mind, they can lead to error messages that signal to Google that your site is broken, which makes it remove or drop your rankings.
While loss in search rankings is the most common reason for traffic loss, it’s not the only one. Other possible reasons include:
- Websites that change brands or domains in a site migration often drop in traffic as fewer people search for the new brand name.
- Websites that reduce the number of pages can lose out on traffic to their old pages.
- If a website migrates its user database, errors in migrating user data can lead to an increase in login errors, leading to fewer people returning.
It’s also important to check for external factors—if your traffic is down post-migration, it might just be a slow week for your ads or social media teams.
How to recover traffic after a web migration
Recovering your traffic loss starts with identifying the source cause of your loss. In most cases, if you can reverse that source fast enough, you can regain the traffic.
However, if you don’t act within a couple of weeks, it is much less likely that you’ll recover the traffic, even if you reverse the change.
Here are the most common causes of traffic loss and what you can do about them:
1. Incorrect or missing redirects
When a site changes its URLs—either in the root domain or the subfolders—redirects need to be in place to point from old URLs to the new one.
For example, if your-site.com migrated to yourwebsite.com, redirects would need to be in place for all pages on the site from the old site versions to the new ones; this is especially important for core site pages. If 301 redirects aren’t in place, your new pages will lose all the SEO value from the old versions, which can cause organic traffic to drop. Anyone who accesses an old URL will also get an error message, leading to a large nonorganic search traffic drop.
You can check for broken or missing redirects manually by pasting old versions of your URLs into a browser’s address bar and seeing if you arrive on the new website. Or you can check programmatically using an SEO tool like Google Search Console or Ahrefs.
Once you identify a broken or missing redirect, create a new 301 redirect rule to the correct page destination. This is typically done within the CMS—in Shopify, it’s under Online Store > Navigation > View URL redirects.
2. Lost or changed content
Sometimes content doesn’t migrate due to an oversight, a conscious decision to consolidate content, or a technical breakdown. If the lost content ranked highly in key searches, restoring the previous content at the same URL may be worth it.
In other cases, the affected pages still exist, but the content on the page has changed substantially from the previous version. This isn’t necessarily bad, but it can signal to search engines that the page’s purpose has changed, affecting how Google ranks it.
Monitor your website analytics tool (such as Google Analytics) for drops in Google traffic to substantially changed content. If your traffic drops, you may have lost rankings and should consider updating your new page’s content to more closely align with some of the written content of the previous version.
Unfortunately, with content-based rankings changes, the recovery is rarely instantaneous.
3. Metadata issues
Metadata is HTML-based information on a page that isn’t part of the on-page experience. Search engines rely on metadata to understand what a page is about. Although metadata is important for SEO, it can be an afterthought in a web migration—with devastating results.
The most common example is the title tag. Search engines treat title tags like the sign in front of your digital store—key information to understand what the page is about. A well-optimized title tag includes both the brand and descriptor of the page’s content. For example, for Shopify.com/blog, the title tag could be “Ecommerce Marketing Blog—Shopify.”
In site rebuilds, web developers often forget to carry over the old values when migrating. Instead, they use placeholder title tags, such as “Home,” “Page 2,” or “Product page.” These tags send a completely different signal to search engines on what the page is about. When search engines notice this, it usually adversely affects rankings.
The good news is that if developers can catch this early in the migration and update the title tags to properly optimized ones, they can often recover their rankings.
Other types of metadata that have similar issues are meta descriptions and canonical tags.
4. Indexing settings
Similar to metadata, search engines read a site’s indexing settings in its HTML and robots.txt (files that tell search engines which URLs to crawl) to understand whether the site should be in search results. Sites that want to be in search results have an “index” HTML tag and a “follow” directive in their robots.txt file.
In a content or platform migration, there are typically two versions of a site pre-migration: the original live site and new site in a staging (prep) environment. Pre-migration, the staging site should not be indexed, as it’s not yet ready. But post-migration, it should be indexed right away.
Migrations often go wrong when the developers don’t change the HTML settings from “noindex” in staging to “index” once it’s live. This can have disastrous short-term SEO effects, as search engines will take it as a request to remove all your pages from Google immediately. Thankfully, the solution is simple—update your HTML tag and robots.txt file to allow indexing, and your traffic should quickly return.
5. Speed issues
If your website loads more slowly post-migration, that can lead to traffic loss. The traffic loss will primarily occur through Google, which views page speed as a ranking factor. But it can also affect your number of returning visitors.
If visitors experience slow load times, they are much less likely to return. Not only will you miss out on traffic due to slower site speeds, you can also miss out on conversions. We recently analyzed data across all companies on Shopify and discovered that even increasing your site speed by just half a second can significantly improve conversion rates.
If your migration was a host migration, discuss options with your hosting service’s support team. You may have code compatibility issues, or they may host your site on servers that are geographically too far from your main audience.
If your migration was a platform migration or redesign, audit the new site using Google Lighthouse. Possible culprits include increased third-party code, too-large image files, or non-optimized JavaScript files. The Lighthouse page speed test will help identify this.
At Shopify, we power the fastest stores in the world—stores that render 1.8x faster than stores on other platforms. To see how your site speed stacks up—and to learn how much faster it could be on Shopify—check out our Site Speed Audit.
6. Broken links
Broken links are any links that lead to a 404 page, including internal links (to other pages on your site) and external links (to other sites). Broken links signal a poor user experience to Google, risking rankings decreases. They can also confuse users, deterring them from returning.
To address broken links post-migration, detect them in a link crawler tool such as Screaming Frog or Semrush, then go to the source page and update them to an appropriate link.
Recover traffic web migration FAQ
How can you migrate without losing traffic?
To migrate without losing your traffic, create a migration checklist for all SEO and UX considerations in migration. Make sure to include a redirect map, metadata review, and page speed audit on your checklist. SEO consultants can also help prepare a checklist specific to your site.
Will domain migration increase SEO traffic?
No, there is nothing inherent to a domain migration that causes increases in SEO-based traffic. A quality domain can help improve your brand’s trust online, helping grow traffic over time, but there is no direct SEO benefit outside of this.
When should you do a web migration?
You should do a web migration when there is a clear business case to invest in the change. When it’s time to execute it, pick a day and time in which you expect relatively low traffic, as migrations can take 24 hours to fully propagate, and, depending on the type of migration, can have some downtime in that period.
