Website Migration Case Study: Why Moving Without an SEO Specialist Can Be Dangerous for Your Site

Initially, the migration seemed successful: traffic on the old site began to decline, while traffic on the new site started to grow. However, after a few months of growth, the traffic began to drop until it eventually fell to zero.

At the beginning, the new website got more and more traffic, but after some time, it started to fall down

The pages on the new site either were not ranked for relevant keywords or occupied positions no better than in the TOP-90.

After a full technical analysis of the website, we discovered many problems, the main ones being:

• Duplicate pages,
• A large number of junk pages that were neither closed off from indexing nor scanning,
• Lack of canonical tags,
• Absence of unique meta tags on traffic-generating pages, etc.

Our team faced during the ecommerce migration case study as well.

Our primary efforts focused on fixing technical errors first. Together with the client’s developers, we managed to resolve most of the issues that hindered normal indexing and crawling of the site.

Additionally, we started working on On-Page optimization:

• Created meta tag templates for all site pages,
• Provided recommendations to improve the site’s usability,
• Offered suggestions to enhance the internal linking structure (for large sites, evenly distributing internal weight is a must-have),
• Began optimizing text for category pages (as this type of page would generate the main traffic to the site),
• Started working on improving the appearance of product pages.

Furthermore, we actively worked on a link-building strategy, obtaining at least 10 quality backlinks from various donor sites each month.

Interestingly, another source of traffic for this site became Reddit. The client actively used this forum to promote their brand, which even helped us secure a few orders.

We actively worked to improve the website’s backlink profile

It’s worth noting that since the site is quite large— the client has over 5,000 products, not counting pagination pages, faceted URLs, etc.— the work on optimizing the site and fixing errors took quite a while; it took us about 7 months for the site to appear again in the search results.

After the December Core Update 2024, we saw that our efforts were not in vain— the number of pages in search results and the site’s rankings began to rise sharply. As of January 2025, in less than a month, we have gained +2620 keywords in search results and +113,423 impressions.

The screenshot above shows the number of keywords the website got within less than a month

Results from GSC for about 20 days

Netrocket has successfully resolved issues and implemented strategic optimizations to smooth this migration and recover the organic traffic after Google’s update.

This case clearly illustrates that any significant changes to a website’s operation without the control of an SEO specialist for ecommerce or any other industry is a game of roulette. If you lose it, you risk losing all your traffic, and recovering it will require substantial resources. That’s why we do not recommend managing the migration on your own.

For this client, we are continuing to develop the site, optimize traffic-generating pages, and plan to further optimize faceted URLs and product pages.