Ideally, there should be no change of traffic pattern and SERP after site migration i.e. shift from one cloud server to another cloud server or a dedicated server. But in reality, often there is a temporary loss of traffic of 10 to 30%. In this article, we will discuss the contributory factors which can affect your site after migration. Keeping an eye on these points probably will help you to get back to your previous state OR maybe, next time you can prevent these issues. We are taking it for granted that there is no change of DNS service provider and CDN provider.
Search Engine Bots Identify Something is Going Wrong
The bots and search engine algorithms can not understand that you are deliberately migrating. They feel the platform is unstable.
When you are changing the IP address against an A record or AAAA record, they face some errors because it is almost obvious that at least for 24 hours there will be issues with DNS propagation. Also, during the unstable period, you tend to restart the server a few times, and test host/server-specific optimizations which throw errors and so in.
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It is not rare to get errors related to ads.txt, robots.txt, sitemap immediately after this phase.
Your overall frontend performance became unstable and slower than the bots because all caches were flushed and disabled. WP Super Cache to APC, Memcached, and Varnish all faced a temporary halt. These issues are not possible to bypass.
Google Search Console tries to list all the indexed pages on your site. Log into Google Search Console and navigate to Indexing > Pages.
Errors Out of Caching and WordPress Plugin Settings
These days we tend to use some plugins to make all the JavaScript asynchronous. A wrong setting may lead to errors in the JSON and XML snippets which are related to SEO. So, check for errors in Google Search Console.
Technical problems also can arise with AdSense and Google Analytics JavaScript when you are implementing caching with APC or Opcache. A few minor changes in the server software or plugin version can trigger errors invisible to human eyes. Hence, you should match the HTML source code of a few pages to make sure that nothing is different between old and new.
Errors Out of MySQL Database
You are not using the “original” MySQL database anymore. You have “copied” the original and deployed it on the new server. This can lead to complete deletion or loss of relationship of some URLs, and some of the meta descriptions can get vanished. When URLs got deleted, you’ll get 404 errors in Google Search Console after 15 days or so. Try to restore these URLs.
Severe Change in Page Loading Speed
If your site used to load within 4 seconds on average, now if it gets loaded at 8 seconds, the search engines may temporarily drop your rank.
Hosting Issues
Firewalls, slow network speed, and country restrictions – all can result in loss of traffic.
How to Fix
Identify the errors and fix them. Continue publishing high-quality articles and get good backlinks. It will take 2-4 weeks to become “normal” after rectifying the errors. Hire an SEO expert after a reasonable period.
