Traffic to blog home page is going down after changing my WordPress Theme
-
I recently changed my wordpress theme from a standard free theme to a newer theme. The home page I switched up a bit adding more calls to action to some of our top posts and leading people to popular categories and so on. This greatly improved the usability of our site as it allowed us to highlight new posts. The previous free template simply listed 10 of our most recent posts on a page with small snippets and then you had to move to the next page to keep reading.
Since switching my theme the blog traffic has stayed relatively level. That being said, the specific posts traffic is going up a lot whereas the organic traffic to the blog homepage is now nearly depleted.
Is this a common thing to happen or is there anything I can do to fix this issue?
-
If you don't mind me asking did you run a complete crawl of the site prior to changing the theme?
I only ask because very unlikely that the identical URL structure will remain considering all the different modifications to photographs and pages.
if you have the original version you could run a screaming frog test on both the original and new site?
https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
you could do this by taking your backed up version of your old site and uploading it to pantheon.io that would allow you a free staging server allowing you to not have to worry about duplicate content and perform tests like this.
Respectfully,
Tom
-
Thanks for your response Thomas. The redesign was simply the theme and none of my URL's have changed or anything..so what would I need to have 301 redirects for?
-
301 use page to page 301 redirects when Migrating a New Site From Development To Live
- https://moz.com/blog/make-or-break-your-site-migration
- https://moz.com/blog/website-migration-guide
- https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93633?hl=en
- https://moz.com/ugc/301-redirects-migrating-a-new-site-from-development-to-live
You need to have page to page 301 redirects
bigger photo https://i.imgur.com/PsM0S7N.jpg
I can get very into depth on this if you'd like just let me know if this answers your question if it does not I am more than happy to go farther into detail.
Look for internal redirects that were not made or are still showing a 301 should be searched and replaced the new URL. And of the 301 Redirect Logic in place.
You can use deep crawl, screaming frog SEO spider & Moz to find these 301 or lack of 301
keep a lookout for the 404 status as that will be your old age that carried link equity and is now pointing the abyss you want to redirect that page to your new press rumbling structure.
** Things that will help you with this process**
Make 301's
-
https://www.rapidtables.com/web/tools/redirect-generator.html
-
Nginx is almost as popular as Apache and in my opinion better here is an htaccess converter to Nginx
-
WordPress site structure
-
** Understanding and finding 404's**
-
**Changing WordPress permalinks **
-
Running a site crawl and checking the current status of your URL's
-
(1&2 Checklists of up to 500 URLs. It's quick, easy and free).
** You can always use Moz**
-
or
-
Checking the current status of any URL any time.
Sincerely,
Tom
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Blog post generating irrelevant traffic. What should I do with it?
I have a blog post that has been generating more than 75% of my website's traffic month over month.-averaging about 1000 views a month. Awesome that so many people are finding and benefiting from this post, however it is really skewing my traffic. I have an 87% bounce rate, and I'm only ranking in terms related to this post as opposed to industry related terms. I'm not sure what to do with this blog post. I want to be able to better evaluate my website's performance and be sure I'm targeting the right audience in order to gain more leads. Would a 'noindex' or 'nofollow' be appropriate here? Thanks!
Content Development | | Ali_DeLeg0 -
About Page - optimization keywords ideas
I am interested to know your thoughts on which keywords to target for your about page. While most keyword strategies are about creating or optimizing pages on categories. This is great for product/service page ideas, but I never know what my about page should come up for. Should it just be your name or can you utilize this page to capture some categories or keywords that are difficult to rank for; I.e We rank well for "web design [location]" not so well for "[location] web design" Regards Rod
Content Development | | VelocityWebsites0 -
No URL for my blog?!!!
I use a website provider for my website. Sadly, although it has an integrated blog, the blog posts title does not get included in the URL. So now, with my limited knowledge of SEO I'm wondering if blogging is still worth it? Any thoughts Greatly appreciated! 🙂
Content Development | | MissThumann0 -
Exchanging Guest Blog Opportunities - SEO Implications?
Haven't found a clear, recent answer on this. What are the SEO implications of exchanging guest blogging opportunities (in other words, we write an article for a partner blog with a backlink, and they write an article on on our blog with a backlink)? The partner site has a 57 domain authority and we have a 24 domain authority.
Content Development | | mikekeeper0 -
Best way to handle blogs for a customer with a chain business?
I have a new customer who owns three local gyms. Each one has its own unique url. I intend to do some blogging for him, and would like it to be effective for SEO. Obviously, publishing duplicate content is out, but writing tons of new posts each month is beyond our scope. Would you recommend having one separate blog (with its own url) that is linked from each of the 3 main sites, or would it be better to create a blog on each site and alternate publishing articles on each one, putting a unique intro and link to the main post on the other two?
Content Development | | ScottImageWorks0 -
Best way to publish FAQs to capture long tail traffic?
If you want to target long tail traffic from commonly asked questions what is the best way to publish answers to these questions? A really long FAQ page, a new page for each question in a /faq/ subfolder, adding them to relevant product pages that already exist? Is creating a new page for each question a problem because the answer might be a paragraph and Google doesn't like thin content?
Content Development | | ProjectLabs0 -
Content Writers / Blog Posts
Hi there Would anyone know where i could fund affordable, reliable blog post writers who would be able to produce quality posts at affordable rates? What would the accepted rate be etc? Regards Stef
Content Development | | stefanok0 -
Help with Duplicate Content Issue for pages...
I have pages with duplicate content, i want to put them on hold while i write unique content as i do not want to get marked down for it. I also want to keep the urls and use them again.
Content Development | | pauledwards
There are about 300 pages affected by duplicate content currently. Am i best doing 302 redirects as it is temporary? to the origional source of the content, or canonical tags no index? The pages are currently indexed and cahced by google, i want to use the url in the future for unique content to get it valued by Google. Any advice much appreciated. Kind Regards,0