Why do some stores lose traffic after migration?

Some stores lose organic traffic after migration because search engines may temporarily struggle to understand the new site structure or important SEO signals may not be preserved.

Common causes include:

• Missing or incorrect 301 redirects from old URLs to new URLs.
• Changes to URL structure that cause important pages to lose their existing signals.
• Missing SEO metadata such as title tags and meta descriptions.
• Crawl or indexing problems, such as accidentally blocking pages with robots.txt or noindex settings.
• Content changes or losses during migration.
• Broken internal links that make pages harder to discover.
• Incorrect canonical tags or duplicate-content issues.
• Slow or poorly optimized pages after the migration.
• Sitemap problems that prevent Google from discovering new URLs efficiently.
• Temporary ranking fluctuations while Google recrawls and reprocesses the migrated site.

To reduce traffic loss, merchants should audit SEO before migration, test redirects and indexing, submit the new sitemap, and closely monitor Google Search Console and organic traffic after launch.