How long does it take to recover traffic after a migration?

For a clean move, often no recovery is needed because there's no real drop. For a typical replatform, plan for full recovery over about three to four months, with the worst point usually falling between the end of month one and the middle of month three. Start diagnosing at the one-month mark if things aren't improving — don't wait six months. The six-month line is the outer bound at which something is fundamentally wrong, not a normal wait time.

Does a same-URL CMS change lose any traffic?

Usually no. If only the back end changes and every URL and the content stays identical, as far as Google is concerned nothing changed. The exception is when a large HTML or file-size change causes long-dormant, low-authority pages to get re-indexed for the first time in a while and start cannibalizing your top pages. That's the non-obvious failure mode behind 'nothing changed but traffic dropped.'

Is a website redesign safer than a full migration?

Not as much as people assume. A redesign that keeps the same domain and URLs still rewrites the HTML structure and file size, which is exactly the input that can trigger Google to re-evaluate pages. Treat a redesign as a real migration: preserve metadata and content, hold load time to a couple of seconds on 4G (Google's Core Web Vitals thresholds are the bar to beat), and don't strip schema. The two most common redesign-specific killers are stripped metadata and gutted content.

What causes traffic drops during a migration?

The recurring root causes are always the same: un-redirected URLs, redirect chains (A to B to C instead of A to B), conflicting canonical and hreflang tags, accidentally blocking the site in robots.txt or leaving a staging no-index in place, and changing too many variables at once. Almost every avoidable drop traces back to one of these — not to the migration itself.

Can a migration actually increase my traffic?

Yes. A well-executed move that also improves site speed, fixes crawl issues, cleans up thin or duplicate content, and ships better structured data can gain traffic from day one. Replatforming off a slow legacy system often raises rankings — but only when the three must-dos hold: keep the content the same, preserve the category hierarchy, and 301 every URL.

Will I lose traffic when I migrate my website?

Q: Will I lose traffic when I migrate my website?

It depends on what you change. Google's own guidance is clear: a clean move — same content and a complete 1:1 redirect map, with only one variable changing — can transition with no meaningful drop period. The dip comes from changing several things at once (domain plus design plus URL structure), un-redirected URLs, or domain-history problems. A typical CMS-plus-URL-structure change tends to dip around 20% and recovers over roughly four months. A redesign on the same domain is not automatically safe — it still rewrites the HTML and can cause a few weeks of volatility.

The honest answer to the #1 migration fear: a clean same-URL move can stay flat; a typical replatform dips ~20% and recovers in ~4 months. What decides it?

What this page covers

Index Right helps content-heavy businesses protect crawlability, indexability, metadata, structured data, Core Web Vitals, and answer-engine visibility during technical SEO migrations.

This raw HTML fallback exists for search crawlers, social crawlers, and AI citation systems that do not execute JavaScript. The hydrated React app provides the full interactive experience for users.

Will I lose traffic when I migrate my website?

What this page covers

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