--- title: "Recover traffic after a website migration | Ian Nuttall" description: "recovery of website traffic after migration" canonical: "https://ian.is/post/migration-traffic-recovery" language: "en" --- # Recover traffic after a website migration Mar 2023 / 33,149 views / [via X](https://x.com/iannuttall/status/1638879827456577539) I acquired an abandoned website for $50,000 and almost immediately lost 50% of the traffic. This is the story of how it happened and what I did to recover it! ![Image from the original X post](https://ian.is/media/tweets/1638879827456577539/1638879827456577539/d3721dd685e7a0eac9c6f949f66026efa1f92943d48c876dd67ab1d22b003733.jpg) It all started with some very persistent outreach that took 3 emails and almost a month to get a reply from the seller. Key takeaway: follow up, but don't give them the ick! ![Image from the original X post](https://ian.is/media/tweets/1638879827456577539/1638879827456577539/cc6f179f089e1bd0d8624add040e7d255b7a920585719b465b5cc5c71a11d92f.jpg) After some back and forth, I agreed to pay a 7x annual multiple. The site was earning $7,200 a year, so the sale price was $50k. The due diligence and handover were very quick - it took just 14 days from setup to completion. A lot of people like to migrate the site to their own servers and chill - let it settle for a few months and see how it performs But not me 😭 The day the deal closed I began looking at data sources + figuring out how I would update this beast of a site (which had 100k+ pages) I made the bold decision to COMPLETELY change all URLs. This was going to be a massive, sweeping change that would need a lot of 301 redirects to keep the site ranking. Video from the original post I used @screamingfrog to crawl the original site and exported it to Excel so I could get my spreadsheet on. It took a solid week for me to map all of the URLs to new, more friendly and manageable ones across 10 sections. I also did a bunch of title tag optimisation and basic keyword research into each of the sections so I knew what to talk about in my programmatic templates. Next up was writing 29 different templates to cover all of the sections! I hired a developer to get the data in the right format for me - but have since rewritten that to use an API which is 10x faster. With data in hand, I could write templates around it. I wrote almost 20k words over 29 templates. Including: \- Variable data to hit long-tail searches \- Tables of information \- Plenty of internal linking \- Data comparisons and analysis \- Dynamic sidebars \- A citation tool I launched the site 25 days after Escrow had closed. And then it all went wrong... ![Image from the original X post](https://ian.is/media/tweets/1638879827456577539/1638879827456577539/b2c85564e4a9095e72afe0f1942bd415f038985667372daceeffa202328594b6.jpg) The traffic nosedived by 40% and then increased to over 50% by the end of the week. Unfortunately, there was a Google algorithm update at the same time as I launched. Did I mess up the migration with the URL changes? Or had Google just slapped me? Even though my $50k investment was looking pretty bad at this point, I didn't panic. The original site was on AdSense and, even with the pasting from Google, I was still eligible for AdThrive. This actually increased earnings by 50% - so I had time to fix things. The first thing I did was set up 404 error monitoring to fix any issues with the migration. I did this multiple times a week and must have added at least 15-20k 301 redirects as a result! ![Image from the original X post](https://ian.is/media/tweets/1638879827456577539/1638879827456577539/98224ae0342744357e4107153e2ab774bbaf204838e8caa3a0feeefd6209a57e.jpg) My original sitemaps were 50,000 URLs each, and I remembered reading that any more than 10,000 can affect indexing. So I changed them. ![Image from the original X post](https://ian.is/media/tweets/1638879827456577539/1638879827456577539/043458c45bea1bbec912ff065eef03924a11bcdd612a37d7a5fd12af5a76697a.jpg) I also created a sitemap of all the old URLs to encourage Google to crawl them and see that the URL had changed. h/t to @Adoubleagent for the sitemap suggestions! The content on the new site was much better than the previous site, but I wanted to do more. I hired two expert writers in the field, with a lot of experience, to produce content that I could add to the templates to improve them even more. Then I waited. For six months. Until the May 2022 Broad Core algorithm update. [https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-may-2022-broad-core-algorithm-update/451783/](https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-may-2022-broad-core-algorithm-update/451783/) Signs of a recovery spiked on May 25th and 26th. Then traffic just kept rising, and rising, like a Phoenix from the ashes! ![Image from the original X post](https://ian.is/media/tweets/1638879827456577539/1638879827456577539/5e8f776439555ab8e4b84f1439c4bbbe10060c64c76b2a1fbdc5b5523a3b1d7b.png) The traffic dropped off a little after this meteoric rise, but it's been stable for almost a year now: \- 250k indexed pages \- 240+ blog posts \- 13k daily visitors \- $6-7k a month in earnings ![Image from the original X post](https://ian.is/media/tweets/1638879827456577539/1638879827456577539/7e083d544a78a9eb16bc658a853c44aaf8dc5d0071a66492be723b5d85aa1451.png) So what can you take away from this? First off: never change a URL in a migration if you can help it. Here's what the traffic looks like for a migration I did on a site with 18,000 URLs where I followed this rule. ![Image from the original X post](https://ian.is/media/tweets/1638879827456577539/1638879827456577539/9bcd27a89aa621384aaabd896184e8b91575ec6d04bfe484382db8fd374f1fbb.jpg) I'd also highly recommend launching with the fewest amount of pages possible. If I could go back, I would have migrated a handful of sections, waited for them to be reindexed, and then slowly worked through the rest. If you have more than 10,000 URLs, it's probably too many! ## Ian's List Join 15k\+ subscribers