How to Recover Traffic After Migration?

Site migrations and migration processes involving different structures are a natural part of SEO work. In this article, I will explain what you can do if your organic traffic starts to decline after a migration. You may even be able to bring your traffic back to levels higher than before.

Website migration processes are always stressful and time-consuming. If you would like a detailed guide on migration, I previously covered this in my SEO and migration article, which you can take a look at. If you ignore well-known technical SEO issues after the migration and say, “we’ll deal with them after the migration,” your SEO performance may decline and recovering it can take a long time. Naturally, this can also lead to decreases in your revenue and conversion rates.

Because of redirects from the old site to the new site, Googlebot may occasionally need to crawl more heavily than usual in order to process the changes. Errors it encounters during crawling are also among the main reasons for traffic declines.

In short, if you experience a significant traffic drop after a site migration, you should work on repairing the damage. I have listed the steps you can take below under separate subheadings:

Confirming the Main Cause of the Decline

If you experience a drop in traffic after the migration, do not automatically assume that the migration is the cause. First, check whether Google has rolled out an algorithm update or whether there has been another change in the search results. After checking these updates, if you believe they have had no impact, you can rule them out and start investigating site migration issues:

IP Controls

Check whether the firewalls on the server are blocking AI bots or search engine bots. You can get help from our tool here: https://ai-bot-access.zeo.org/. Sometimes this can be the main issue, and without needing further technical SEO analysis, you may be able to resolve the IP problem, allow Googlebot to crawl the site, and regain your previous traffic. You can also immediately check user-agent and country restrictions in this context:

Speaking of servers, if the new site loads slowly and pages take a long time to be generated, you may not achieve the organic performance you want if your new pages have poor page speed.

Control of Redirect Lists

What I mean by a redirect list is essentially a list showing which old URLs will redirect to which new URLs. These lists may contain only a few entries or millions of rows. One of the issues I encounter most often with the brands I work with is that the implementation sometimes goes beyond the recommended list and that the final redirect setup has not been properly planned. So if your traffic is declining, make sure you check these redirects.

Also, keep the redirects in place for at least 1 year after the migration (although in my opinion, you should keep them for longer). This allows Googlebot to rediscover some URLs through the old redirects even if they are at a very deep click depth:

3xx Controls

Since redirecting old pages during a migration is not a temporary redirect, we recommend using a 301 status code instead of 302. When reviewing all redirects, you can check whether they are actually redirecting with a 301. Sometimes redirect errors like these can contribute to a decline in your site’s traffic.

Also, use HTTPS checks to confirm that these migrations are being handled with a secure certificate. Actions like these can help recover lost traffic.

Crawl Results

I assume you have already crawled the site after the migration, but I wanted to remind you. In the crawl results, you can review issues that may need to be prioritized:

• Noindex pages,
• 4xx pages,
• Duplicate pages,
• Canonicalized Pages.

For example, you can review non-200 pages and check whether you have reported them to the development teams or whether any of them are important pages:

Using SEO crawl tools can help you quickly identify technical SEO issues. If you ran a crawl before the migration, you can compare it with the post-migration crawl using these tools and see newly increased issues more clearly:

One of the most common issues I encounter after migrations is problems with canonical tags. For this reason, instead of checking only the redirects of the new pages, you should also check whether they point to the canonical URLs you want.

Most Impacted Pages

You should check whether the pages with the best organic performance on your old site were migrated successfully. This way, if your traffic dropped after the migration, you can clearly identify the pages that were affected the most.

Use Google Search Console for this. Analyze and compare historical data to identify the pages with the most clicks and the highest positions. Then confirm that their content and metadata are exactly the same as they were on the old site. If images are not appearing after the migration or certain parts of the content have been removed, your pages may have been affected. You can also use tools such as Ahrefs to analyze the pages that have experienced declines more clearly:

Along with the most affected pages, you can perform a more bulk analysis to identify the page types that have been affected the most. For example, analyses such as whether the biggest decline is occurring on PDPs or PLPs can make your work easier:

Backlinks

If you have set up the redirects correctly, backlinks will already be redirected automatically with 301s. If there is an error in your redirect setup and backlinks you have earned from sites that provide valuable links for users are now returning 404s, your organic traffic may also have been affected and declined as a result. I recommend checking your backlinks after the migration as well.

Contents & Meta Tags

Don’t assume this is something you would never forget - it happens :) Make sure your content has been migrated with the subheadings and formatting you intended. Also check the custom meta title and description tags you created for the content. Sometimes subheadings you marked as H2 can become H5 after a migration. In my opinion, you should include a ‘things to check in the content’ item in your notes and review it, because missing elements in the content can even cause you to lose featured snippets.

Structural Data

Even if schema code is migrated to the new site, the old site name may still appear in the “url” field, or URLs from the old site may remain in the “image” property. SEO tools may consider these valid, but this is actually an incorrect implementation. For this reason, check the schema structures for each page type and use Search Console to analyze the structured data for which you lost traffic after the migration.

Sitemaps

Submitting an XML sitemap to GSC that contains all the pages of the new site that you want to be indexed allows Google to become aware of your new site’s URLs, so it knows which pages to crawl.

However, when old URLs cannot be found by Google, a common issue is that redirect signals are not transferred to the new URLs. To resolve this issue, create an additional sitemap containing all indexable pages from the old site and submit it to GSC. This action allows Google to discover the redirects, which can help it update your rankings more quickly.

Finally, if you ask, “Samet, we did everything, but we still can’t get our old traffic back,” the answer will vary from site to site. I don’t know your site, so many questions come to mind - perhaps you did not actually complete the things you said you had fixed, or you completed the work with long gaps in between.

I hope this article has been useful and has helped you create a to-do list for checking certain things again. Remember that fixing all the issues on a site requires patience and time. Wishing you not only a full recovery of your previous traffic, but even more organic traffic than before!