Traffic drop after migration?

[neooptic]

Hi everybody.

One of my clients is looking to move their e-commerce site to a new platform in the next few weeks. However, they been told by several sources that traffic will drop after a migration, which they want to avoid in the run up to Christmas.

I've not heard this before, and I thought as long as you pay attention to structure, indexing and redirects a migration should have no impact. We'd be moving to a site with cleaner code, so surely there wouldn't be some kind of penalty for that?

Your thoughts would be great!

S

[dumperama]

While I cannot speak for a whole platform (this will soon be happening), I just tested it with a single page of which I changed the URL structure as well as optimizing on-page - the whole website is one mess of spam.

I can only second the advices the posters before have given you: Wait until the crucial time for you business is over.

I experienced the following: I prepared an optimized text for the adjusted site, figured out the best keyword to rank for (quite competitive)  and decided which URL would serve my needs the best. So the structure before was like www.domain.com/brand_page/_22-key-word2-translatedkeyword.php (ranked 20). This was changed to www.domain.com/key-word.html.

We used 301 Permanent Redirect.

The outcome: After 2 days, the old URL was kicked out of the index. Then it took Google 6 days to index the site with the new URL structure but with disastrous ranking (28 first entry). Then it took around 5 days until we reclaimed rank 20. Three days after, we ranked 10 - and we're still there.

So for the targeted short-tail keyword, it payed off.

BUT: Nearly none of the  long-tail keywords that generated traffic for the old page are ranking keywords for the page right now. Only little by little we start to rank again for them, but it is 3,5 weeks now.

To cut a long story short: I'd do it another time in the year, it is better for the client's business.

[StoresDirect]

The change in platform required a lot of redirects, partly because we took the opportunity to improve our catalogue structure. We had a couple of good programmers in-house at the time, and they set up a script to do the redirects on all the important pages as well as a catch-all redirect which caught anything which hadn't been specified and redirected it to the new home page. Excuse me if I'm a bit vague about this - I came into SEO dealing with on-page issues and have expanded my skill set into other areas, but I don't play with the code myself! Getting the redirects right is critical to make sure the re-built site can be indexed quickly and that users don't encounter lots of error pages. I know they also did a lot of work on the new new site in a testing environment so they could find and fix as many problems as possible before launch.

[neooptic]

I'd agree with holding it off, except the current architecture is so bad that the site can't cope with the increase in traffic over Christmas. We're moving to a much better, more stable platform.

What measures did you use to speed up the recovery, if any?

Thanks for your answer, it's really helpful.

[StoresDirect]

We've had this on a move from osCommerce to Magento. We had a scary drop in rankings and traffic then everything gradually picked up again. I'd say we were back to normal within 2-3 weeks. We made the move at our quietest time of year - this was a good decision as the impact on cash flow was minimised and we had plenty of time to deal with any problems. We'll be going through it again in a few months for one of our other sites, but again we will make the change during our quietest period. Unless there is some urgent reason for them to make the change now I would advise them to hold off until a quieter time - this sort of project can throw up unexpected delays and technical issues, and you want to prevent consequential financial losses as far as possible.