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

[ichsie]

We hired a team and designed the theme for <snip> on Shopify which had been previously on Magento. On Sept. 8th we finished the theme, created all 301 redirects (products, categories to collections, pages, WordPress blog posts to Shopify blog posts), 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.

<snip> (Sep 9, 2020-Nov 19, 2020 comparison against previous period)
<snip> (Overal traffic drop by 49.75%)
<snip> (Straight traffic drop ever since Sep 9, 2020)

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: <snip>

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.

Also as a comparison, here’s the stats of May 19, 2019-Nov 19, 2019 in GA for <snip> 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.

<snip> (May 19, 2019-Nov 19, 2019 no traffic drop at all)

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!

[edited by: buckworks at 10:08 am (utc) on Nov 22, 2020]
[edit reason] Snipped links that would identify the site. See TOS. [/edit]

[buckworks]

Sorry we had to snip identifying information. I left as much as I could. We do specific site reviews in the supporters section if you'd like to re-post with the snipped info included.

It's not clear from your post ... the new version is .com and the old version is .net. Did you change domains at the same time or did you just move the old version to the .net domain for archive purposes or some such?

Having two versions online is likely to be part of the problem. I would consider it urgent that if you're leaving the old version online for whatever reason, make sure it cannot be indexed. Having two versions of the site in the index will only create competition between the old and new, and the search engines won't know which is supposed to be the real site.

I checked just now and the .net version has three times more pages in Google's index than the .com version. (The query to check that is site:example.com.)

None of the .net pages I checked were redirecting to the .com; they're just sitting there fully able to compete with the .com version in the search results. That needs attention.

What changes were made to titles, headings, product copy and so on when you moved to the new templates? Did you try to keep the same wording or were there lots of changes in what the pages said? That might be another part of the mix.

Your site is part of an industry that I'm quite familiar with, at least in North America. I can tell you that many companies that sell products like yours are suffering drastic declines because of the coronavirus. Some are not surviving. Some parts of the world are doing better but if some of your business comes from North America, reduced demand will be another factor in what you're seeing.