Traffic drop off

[David Bryce]

Hi - 

 

I migrated a 20+ year old community to Invision in January.  We've had a very consistent flow of traffic on our previous site for years.  Since migrating to Invision, I've noticed a steady drop off in traffic.  Not a slight one, either - more than half - and not all at once, either.  It seems to be steadily decreasing, specifically organic searches.

Worse, I'm nowhere near as knowledgeable as I wish I were in these areas.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

dB

[Matt]

Hi David,

Diagnosing changes to traffic can be tricky. Do you have any figures or charts to share? Can you either DM me or share the link to the site here?

[Matt]

We do periodic SEO updates, our latest focused on crawl budget and efficiency:
 

I'm happy to review your site and see if there's some low hanging fruit we can pick. It is normal to see a temporary drop in traffic when you switch platforms. It's worth checking your Google Search Console for any crawling errors, etc.

[Matt]

I've had a quick look at your site, and Google has 31,700 links available by search. I'd definitely check on the crawl progress and check for any crawl errors. It might just be that it needs some time to recover as more content is indexed.

What platform did you convert from?

[David Bryce]

Hi, Matt - 

 

These are all excellent questions.  I’m not sure I can answer all of them.  

We migrated from UBB Central.  The metrics I’m looking at are Google.  I’m not sure how to  best share those.

 

As far as crawl progress…that’s over my head, I’m afraid.

 

What I can tell is that we had what appeared to be really steady organic traffic for years…and it appears to be dropping off a whole lot since we migrated.

 

I would love to be able to pay a consultant to spend time helping me make sure I’m doing everything right.  It’s heartbreaking to see this huge drop…and worse not being sure I fully understand what I’m seeing.

 

dB

 

[Dll]

It's not unusual for a large site to take a few months to settle down in the search results after a migration.

[David Bryce]

Thanks, DII.

 

Is it unusual for the results to drop off not sharply after the migration, but in a constantly descending line?  That’s seems unusual to me.

 

dB

[Dll]

Not necessarily. Google is unlikely to spider your whole site that frequently. So as it discovers the old URLs are gone and have been redirected to new ones, it'll be taking the old ones out of the index and replacing them with the new ones. (Assuming you've set up the redirects properly - eg if you go to the old URLs they 301 redirect to the new ones).

That all takes a bit of time, particularly in terms of ranking the new URLs in hopefully similar positions to where they were.

[Emediate]

We did something similar a few years ago. Don't expect too much to happen too quickly. It was at least 6 months before Google figured out exactly what changed, and reindexed everything accordingly.