Lost 86% of traffic after moving old static site to WordPress

[JakubH]

I hired a company to convert an old static website www.rawfoodexplained.com with about 1200 pages of content to WordPress.

Four days after launch it lost almost 90% of traffic. It was getting over 60,000 uniques while nobody touched the site for several years. It’s been 21 days since the WordPress launch. I read a lot of stuff prior to moving it (including Moz's case study) and I was expecting to lose in short term 30% of traffic max…

I don’t understand what is wrong. The internal link structure is the same, every url is 301 to the same url only without[dot]html (ie www.rawfoodexplained.com/science.html is 301′s to http://www.rawfoodexplained.com/science/ ), it’s added to Google Webmaster tool and Google indexed the new pages…

Any ideas what could be possible wrong? I do understand the website is not optimized (meta descriptions etc, but it wasn't before either) .... Do you think putting back the old site would recover the traffic? I would appreciate any thoughts

Thank you

[JakubH]

WhiteboardCreations: thanks, I may try the plugin and cancel 301s

Takeshi Young:

• well it's over three weeks as mentioned above, the traffic dropped after 4 days

• G Webmaster do not show any 404

• new pages were indexed within two days

• I use Yoast plugin and do not index tags, categories etc

• there were no changes inside the actual pages and the traffic were through whole site, not just few high traffic pages

[TakeshiYoung]

I would check in Moz Analytics or Google Webmaster Tools to see if there are any new 404 errors to ensure that the 301 redirects were put into place properly. It could be possible that not everything was redirected properly.

I would also look at the indexation numbers in GWT as well as run a site: search in Google, to see if any new pages have been indexed. Wordpress tends to create a lot of duplicate content pages such as category archives, tag archives, date based archives, author pages, etc. so make sure those aren't being indexed. Use a All-In-One SEO or Yoast plugins to clear those up.

Finally, go into Google Analytics and look at the landing pages that were driving the most traffic before, and compare it to after the change. You may be able to isolate a few high traffic pages that are responsible for the traffic drop.

If none of those things turns up a problem, don't panic. 4 days is not a long time and an 80% drop is not unheard of. It can take some time for Google to digest all the changes, depending on the size and authority of your site. Make sure to submit your site to be indexed in GWT under Crawl -> Fetch as Google. You can also speed up Google's crawl by building more links to your site. Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+ are all easy ways to get pages crawled and indexed, as well as getting links from high authority sites.

[WhiteboardCreations]

Jakub,

It seems you/your developer have done all the right steps in a migration from HTML to WP, so it's a bit odd you took that hard of a hit in the SERPs. One trick a peer taught one of our developers was to consider this plugin http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-page-extension/. It can allow you to create custom URL extensions, which may help keeping it on WP but giving you the .html like you had before with 301. Just an idea to consider. Hope this helps!

Patrick