A website migration can be a stressful and time-consuming project for any business. But it can also be a risk to your performance, with a variety of things that can go wrong. When not executed properly, a migration can lead to your site losing traffic, conversions, and revenue.

Risks to your performance can be avoided by ensuring everything is in place correctly to avoid unwanted consequences. But sometimes even small things that fall through the net can lead to problems and see performance drop. Common SEO mistakes, such as improperly configured redirects, can cause your site to take a hit.

If this does happen, you’ll need to work to repair the damage in a methodical and timely manner to help recover your traffic sooner rather than later. Thankfully, there are several steps you can take to return to pre-migration levels.

Let’s take a look at how a website migration can affect traffic, and explore how to fix any issues that do crop up to help your new site recover.

What is a website migration?

A website migration is the process of making significant updates to your website, often affecting its design, location, and structure. It could be migrating to a new hosting provider, domain, or from HTTP to HTTPS. Due to the major changes during a web migration, SEO and AI visibility can be affected.

There’s no single definition of a website migration, as it can combine various changes. For example, you might just move to a new domain name and want to keep everything else the same, or you may change the design and structure as well.

These are some of the main types of website migration and what they involve:

  • Design migration – changing the layout, functionality, and overall design of your website to improve user experience.
  • Domain migration – moving to a new domain name.
  • Structural migration – amending the URL structure and navigation to be cleaner and easier.
  • Content migration – rewriting, removing, and updating lots of content in one go as part of a huge overhaul.
  • Platform migration – switching to a different hosting platform or content management system (CMS).

How long does a website migration take?

It can take anywhere from one to four weeks for a website migration for a small or medium-sized business. For big websites and those undergoing large-scale migrations, it may take a few months. Plus, there’s all the time spent planning and preparing ahead of the migration to minimise mistakes (a step not to be missed).

Generally, it takes a few weeks for Google to crawl and index a brand-new, medium-sized website, while larger sites can take even longer. This is because Google processes the changes and performs a heavier crawl due to the redirects from the old site to the new one.

Why can traffic drop after a site migration?

It’s normal to experience a drop in organic traffic after a site migration at first, as it takes Google time to recrawl, reindex, and understand the content. After this, traffic should hopefully recover to (or exceed) pre-migration levels — if the migration is successful.

However, a site migration can break pathways that search engines have used for years to comprehend and rank your webpages. When these aren’t protected, a fall in traffic after a migration could happen.

Site migration errors can mean Google evaluates your website as being brand-new, losing all the authority and traffic you previously established. There are several common reasons this can happen:

  • Missing or broken redirects
  • Old and unsubmitted XML sitemap
  • Technical SEO issues
  • Significant content changes
  • robots.txt and noindex issues.

Common causes of lost traffic after a web migration

Let’s look in more detail at some common reasons why websites lose traffic following a migration before moving on to fixing the problem.

Redirects

Poor redirecting during a migration can create unwanted redirect loops and duplicate content. The latter occurs when the HTTP to HTTPS redirects aren’t site-wide and permanent, or when your links don’t point solely to the WWW or non-WWW version of your site. This can negatively impact your traffic, as Google becomes confused about which of the identical pages it should rank in the top results.

Failing to verify that every URL is redirected correctly to the new location compromises the integrity of your URL structure. Missing or incorrect redirects lead users to the infamous 404 page after clicking a link on your old site. If your users can’t find what they need from you, they’ll go elsewhere.

Let’s not forget external links, either. Failing to redirect external links leads to traffic loss from the direct traffic they send to your site. You can’t notify every page that links back to you, so the problem has to be fixed from within.

It’s not just visitors that get lost in the process — poor redirection will also make search engines turn away. You’ll be deemed untrustworthy by Google as it won’t know where your site has migrated to. Without any indexing or crawling, you’re essentially non-existent on the internet, as well as in both paid and organic searches.

Canonical changes

Canonical tags let Google know which URL represents the master copy of a page. If, after a migration, they point to non-relevant pages or URLs that no longer exist, it can cause issues. Canonicalising the old site is potentially a critical issue, as it could prevent your new site from being indexed.

There are several common incorrect canonical changes that may happen during a site migration:

  • missing canonical tags
  • canonical tags pointing to old or non-existent URLs
  • improperly implemented self-referencing canonicals
  • poor canonical logic
  • canonical tags that point to non-relevant URLs.

Missing content

Removing and stripping back content during a migration risks losing keywords and relevance. This could result in fewer and lower rankings, less search and AI visibility, and ultimately a drop in traffic.

Accidents happen, and it’s sometimes easy to skip content and important elements when migrating to a new site. This can include missing page titles, headers, meta descriptions, and even bits of body copy.

Changes to content should elevate it, but mistakes could create a less cohesive content structure. And making massive overhauls to lots of content at once may make it harder to keep track of everything you move over and identify what works and what doesn’t.

XML sitemap problems

A new site structure after a migration means you must submit a fresh XML sitemap to Google Search Console (GSC) containing all the new site’s indexable pages. This makes Google aware of your new site’s URLs, so it knows which ones to crawl.

Failing to submit a new XML sitemap could mean Google takes much longer to crawl and index your pages — if it can find them at all. Incomplete URLs, typos, and listing other sitemap index files may also create problems. This can slow or prevent the indexing of pages, resulting in lost traffic.

Lost source code

Source code powers your site. It’s also the human-readable text that Google reads to determine whether and how your web pages should be indexed and how they should appear in the SERPs.

During migration, important source code, such as metadata and schema markup, can be lost. If this occurs, Google will struggle to understand what your website and content are about, affecting your site’s rankings and traffic.

Slow page speed

It’s common for your page speed to slow down when you carry out a full website migration or change servers.

Faster page speed results in a better user experience and SEO performance, as it’s a ranking factor, so the faster the better. Slower page load times compared to your old site can negatively affect rankings and visibility, and put off users who will quickly go elsewhere, losing traffic and potential business.

Image issues

Did your site receive high levels of image traffic pre-migration? Changes to image URLs, broken links, and missing alt text could all reduce traffic previously driven by image search. Accidental additions of unnecessary metadata can increase image file sizes, and changes to generic file names may also impact rankings. Like all other elements of your site, your images need to be in tip-top shape to avoid a negative hit in search.

Lost backlinks

Backlinks signal to search engines that the content on your site is valuable, authoritative, and relevant — so they’re very important. If old links are broken or direct users to your old site, it can create issues for the search engine. Losing backlinks reduces the power of your new site post-migration, as there are fewer external authority signals pointed to your site.

Steps to recover from web migration mistakes

If you see a huge traffic drop after a faulty site migration, it’s important to take action immediately to recover and minimise any further damage. These steps help pinpoint the problem and start your recovery.

Determine what caused the drop

Don’t automatically assume the migration is the culprit after a decline in traffic post-migration. Check external factors like algorithm updates and keyword cannibalisation that can affect the flow of organic traffic to your new site. If you can confidently rule these out, then look at migration issues.

To revive your failing pages, you’ll need to identify what went wrong during the migration and use data from a site crawl to pinpoint the issue causing the traffic loss for each page.

Crawl your new site

Conduct a thorough site crawl to pinpoint the issues plaguing your new site. Great tools for running a crawl include Ahrefs and Screaming Frog. Use them to analyse your website’s health, the site structure, and any technical issues that could cause your ranking drops and traffic loss.

These tools help you rapidly discover technical SEO issues and provide data for comparison if you performed a major scan and data backup on your old site before your migration. They can provide deeper insights and identify common potential problems:

  • Broken links
  • Duplicate content
  • Missing metadata
  • Redirects
  • URLs blocked by robots.txt.

Identify pages with the biggest traffic drops

Use Google Analytics (GA) or GSC to research which pages were the top performers on your previous site. Analyse current and historical data to look for pages with the most clicks, highest-ranking positions, impressions, link equity, and organic search traffic.

Check that the top-performing pages have successfully transferred and look for any significant traffic loss, as these should be the ones driving the most. Ensure their content and metadata are the same as they were on the old site, or that any updates have been implemented correctly.

Gather all the affected pages in a database or spreadsheet to see what changed. Prioritise pages that had the highest level of conversions and traffic and have lost the biggest percentages in traffic. Then, you can use this data to spot if there’s a common issue affecting many of them or if each page requires individual analysis. Once you’ve spotted the problem, you can take decisive action.

Resolve redirect issues

Managing your redirects correctly is critical for a successful site migration. Maintaining the integrity of your URL structure ensures every URL is redirected correctly to the new location:

Confirm all redirects are 301 (permanent) redirects and not 302 (temporary). Setting up 301 redirects tells search engines the content has permanently moved to a new location. This preserves backlinks and rankings value to maintain SEO visibility and traffic.

Prioritise fixing redirects that go towards canonicalised, error, non-indexable, or 404 (not found) pages.

Make sure redirects go to the correct page destination. These should be the new counterparts or pages that feature similar, relevant content and have the same purpose as the original one being redirected.

Fixing platform issues post-migration

If you’ve re-platformed or moved servers, there are a few issues to keep an eye out for that can provide a fix:

  • Check if firewalls are blocking search engine bots.
  • Check if the platform is using JavaScript to render the page, as this can make it difficult for bots to crawl the content of the page.
  • Review any country restrictions.

Check canonical issues post-migration

Analyse the canonical tags of your pages to see if they were changed in a way that impacted your traffic. Keep an eye out for any programming issues, such as a missing trailing slash.

Ensure your pages are either self-canonicalised or canonicalised to where they should be and not to non-relevant URLs, like the homepage. If they’re not being canonicalised to the right place, it’s a quick fix to point them in the right direction.

Review and optimise content

Your content should be brought across to the new site and tagged correctly, including meta titles and descriptions, headings, and body copy. The content and descriptions for pages should be the same (unless you’re updating any of them), but just look different with your new site design.

Content on your new site needs a strong structure with headers and relevant sections broken down to present information clearly. This helps users to easily navigate pages, search engines and AI tools to better comprehend and surface content from your new site.

If you experience content issues after your site migration, try the following to resolve the issue:

  • Update or rewrite HTML markup, meta descriptions, and title tags.
  • Check on-page SEO items are correctly configured — H1 tags, image sizes, and good keyword optimisation.
  • Assess the uniqueness of the content and ensure it’s valuable and contains relevant keywords while avoiding spammy practices.
  • Review internal links within your content to ensure good anchor text and relevant, natural linking.
  • Ensure any content removed redirects users to a page based on their original intent.

Resolve XML sitemap issues

XML sitemap issues can be resolved if you try the following:

  • Check your XML sitemap to ensure it covers all the essential URLs to index for the new site.
  • Only include canonical pages — exclude pages with no organic value to site visitors or other pages you don’t want to be indexed.
  • Create a second XML sitemap that includes all the old site’s indexable pages and submit it to GSC. This enables Google to discover and follow the redirects in place, allowing it to quickly update your standings in the SERPs.
  • Remove the sitemap containing the old URLs once the crawling process is complete, as it points at URLs that don’t matter to you anymore.
  • Submit an updated XML sitemap when ready.

Update robots.txt

Check and create a new robots.txt file for your new site. If you fail to update it, then search engines may follow your old one. This can block important pages on your new site or enable access to those that should be blocked, causing crawling and visibility issues.

Implement a new robots.txt file that aligns with what and how you want search engines to crawl your site and index pages. Then use GSC to test and adjust as appropriate.

Manage your backlink profile

Once you’ve fixed the old URLs and internal links on your site, it’s time to secure your backlinks. Use a backlink tool to gather this information and prioritise the pages that generated the most traffic.

  • Run a backlink audit using Ahrefs or SEMrush.
  • Review the backlink audit results to see if any high-authority backlinks now point to broken or non-existent pages.
  • Reach out to the webmasters and site owners linking to your old site and ask them to update their links to your new URLs.
  • Redirect broken links to your new site’s similar or same page.

Review source code

To fix potential source code issues after a migration, try this:

  • Use your earlier crawl to establish if any meta or markup is missing on your new website that was present on the old one.
  • Check for any content or link accessibility issues — use the URL inspection tool in GSC to “test live URL” and identify any issues that Google and your users might have when attempting to access/view a page.
  • Work with your development team to make content visible where it’s missing.

Improve page speed

For page speed issues, try the following:

  • Use PageSpeed Insights to check the loading speeds of your pages and identify any that are slow to load.
  • Avoid multiple page redirects that cause visitors to face additional time waiting for the HTTP request-response cycle to complete.
  • Minify your CSS, HTML, and JavaScript code, using a content distribution network.
  • Check, compress, and optimise any large images that may take longer to load.

Update images

Check whether your CDN allows you to make one quick change to all the images on the site, which can save a lot of time. Then check the following:

  • Image URLs link to the correct images.
  • Image URLs are linked to the new domain.
  • Images have relevant and descriptive alt text and file names.
  • All images are optimised for mobile.
  • There are no large image files that slow down page loading speed.

Conduct a successful web migration with SALT.agency

Correcting all the issues on the site requires patience and time. If you’re still struggling to identify the traffic drops — or planning a migration — get in touch today to discuss your project and discover how our experts at SALT.agency can help your recovery or move go smoothly.