Traffic drop by 49.75% after migration from Magento to Shopify?

Yang_Yang
Shopify Partner
17 0 3

We hired a team and designed the theme for https://www.princessly.com on Shopify which had been previously on Magento. On Sept. 8th we finished the theme and migrated everything over to Shopify and since then we've seen a constant drop in traffic as compared to when the site was on Magento. 

drop-1.pngdrop-2.pngdrop-3.png

As you can see from the screenshots of Google Analytics, there's a significant sharp drop in traffic immediately after we migrated. We have been trying to find the culprit here but as it looks like an overall drop across ALL traffic acquisition channels, therefore, we don't have any clue as to why this happens?

There's not only the drop in traffic but also a drop in transactions & revenues on the same scale. It's as frustrating as it is weird because half of external traffic sources seem to suddenly cease arriving on my site as if they know my site is different so they suddenly refuse to land on our site??

We still have the old site online if you want to compare: https://www.princessly.net

At first we thought it's just a coincidence of traffic fluctuations and it would return to normal after a few days or weeks but it seems we are wrong.

We are truly desperate at this point with so much invested in marketing and re-design but results cut in half. Any help would be tremendously appreciated! Thank you!

http://www.Princessly.com
Replies 7 (7)

Timmy_Tran
Tourist
7 0 4

Hi @Yang_Yang

I’m Timmy from LitExtension team. In this situation, you might get some trouble with your websites’ URL after switching. Did you perform 301 redirects from your Magento store to Shopify?

Let me explain to you more about this. SEO URLs are of great importance as it brings a huge number of organic traffic to your store. However, each platform has its own URL structures, so when re-platforming your new store, it will be changed. Thus, 301 redirect is a key point to maintain your website’s domain authority and search ranking. 

Simply, with 301 redirects, when someone clicks to your Magento’s store address (or any product URL) or type it on Google search bar, they will be automatically led to Shopify page which is active with what they are looking for and represented by new URL. Currently, if you didn’t use 301 redirects, I think it might be the main reason for losing your traffic. 

Now, you can go to the Search Console and find your broken link, after that redirect them to your new Shopify store’s URL. In case you want to perform any migration in the future, please keep in mind 301 redirects and 404 page not found error matters, which will affect directly to your SEO performance.

 

Timmy Tran - LitExtension Expert
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Yang_Yang
Shopify Partner
17 0 3

Thank you for the first follow-up.

Yes, we have done ALL 301 redirects wherever possible, products, categories to collections, even WordPress blog to Shopify blog for EVERY posts.

I'm afraid you don't get the situation as it's totally different in that the traffic seems to never arrive on our site, otherwise, even if we haven't set up the redirects, the traffic should still be there on our site with Google Analytics giving the same traffic stats with higher bounce rate and shorter duration, right?

Because there is the GA tracking code on Shopify 404 NOT FOUND page.

Make sense?

Lacking 301 redirects doesn't explain the 49.75% traffic drop and we DO have them in place from the very beginning.

Also as a comparison, here's the stats of May 19, 2019-Nov 19, 2019 in GA for Princessly.com when it's still on Magento, so we can rule out the season factor. Traffic is actually climbing as we sell through summer to fall.

drop-4.png

 

This is truly weird.

 

 

http://www.Princessly.com
Yang_Yang
Shopify Partner
17 0 3

Can somebody help please?

This is as weird as it is frustrating....

http://www.Princessly.com
KieranR
Shopify Partner
333 27 115

With a change like that across all digital channels, it makes me wonder if the GA setup was correct both before and/or after the move.

Does the Revenue in GA match the revenue from actual ecom sales. Usually GA doesn't see all sales, but if it's something like 90% of all sales before new site, and still 90% of all sales after new site, then that kinda indicates the transaction accuracy has been sustained. 

You can't really assume the analytics itself is reliable, have you run some sanity checks to see if things have changed?

There's a few things to try to help investigate and diagnose a drop like this:

  • Look at total traffic split source in isolation: paid search, organic search, email sessions, social sessions, referral etc in GA. 
  • Look at traffic by URL (top 10-20 or so pages), split by traffic source, see what sources have dropped.

That will usually give you some better clues. You can then drill down into the detail of each traffic source - if organic search for example then you could start to look at GSC data to find what specific changes to keywords/clicks/impressions by URL in GSC. 

Lots of things potentially going on here, better to get a good web analyst and pay them to take a proper look at these things. 

Full time Shopify SEO guy, based in NZ. Sometimes freelance outside the 9-5.
Selina333
Visitor
3 0 0

Hello,

 

Two of my clients have been a similar issue since migrating onto Shopify.

 

1 client migrated from Visualsoft to Shopify and the other client migrated from Magento.

 

Both clients have checked the revenue from the backend with Google Analytics and this is all correct. 

 

Both client's have seen a significant drop in traffic and revenue. They have also added in 301 redirects too, but are facing a similar issue.

 

I don't think this is a tracking issue and more a Shopify issue. Has anyone else had this issue and figured out how to get performance back to the same level as pre-migration?

KieranR
Shopify Partner
333 27 115

I've moved sites to Shopify and seen a lift, so it's not a Shopify issue per se. 

 

As I indicated, go channel by channel and try to pinpoint which channels, pages, products, categories etc dropped (landing page entrys, landing page conversions, CvR etc) by how much exactly. Visually inspect the old vs new URLs one by one. Look at the top KW by click and impressions in GSC and see what has happened before and after. For the top pages for the top KW what has changed about them? 

 

If you've actually done some decent diagnosis here you should usually be able to pinpoint where the issues lie.

 

In my experience (at least from the SEO angle) most post-migration traffic loss comes from unintended detrimental changes to category & product names, content, schema and site structure. Not the platform itself. But in saying that - usually after a large migration where there are lots of 301s are necessary, it can take some time (anywhere from weeks to months) for Google to transfer over any external 'link juice'. 

Full time Shopify SEO guy, based in NZ. Sometimes freelance outside the 9-5.
Selina333
Visitor
3 0 0

Thank you for your response.

 

The traffic loss has been across all channels though. We don't get the same impressions or clicks on any channel including PPC. We also had fixed any 301s , retained the same categories, product name, site structure etc. We've also had a technical audit done and it all seemed fine. 

 

I'm really struggling to find any solutions to be honest. Thanks for your help on this though.