Migration to Joomla - impact on AdSense earnings?

[macavity]

After many years running my sites on a CMS which is now hardly supported at all I'm considering jumping ship to Joomla.

I've read more than a few horror stories over the years of AdSense earnings taking a steep nosedive in this kind of scenario but I'm not sure how representative they are of what I should expect if we do migrate.

If anyone has any first hand experience of moving to Joomla from another CMS I'd be grateful if you could share what happened to your AdSense earnings. Did they fall? Did they rise? If they fell, did they recover over time? etc.

Many thanks in advance.

[leadegroot]

off the top of my head, there are 3 things that can impact earnings when making changes like this:
- changing the url
- changing the page layout
- changing the page load time

Changing the url
While joomla urls are somewhat customisable they probably won't be able to match your old urls precisely. Make sure you come up with a strategy to 301 the old urls to the new one, and best practice is to do it in one step, rather than with multiple 301s

Changing the page layout
Its absolutely shocking how small a change can impact earnings, although sometimes the impact is upwards :) Not often enough , though :(
It should be perfectly doable to replicate your current html in joomla

Changing the page load time
Again, page load time can impact earnings and can impact search placement (which then ripples through to earnings). Of course, its possible Joomla is faster than your current CMS!

Hope it helps!

[macavity]

Thanks, that's very useful.

I need to dig further into Joomla to see if/how we can replicate our old URLs. I suppose one good thing may be that we've always used a (large) .htaccess file to facilitate the use of user-friendly/non-CMS dependent URLs so I'm hoping we'll somehow be able to transpose them exactly if we do move to Joomla.

Changing the page layout is the biggie, though - I'd expect the new layout to be much nicer (aesthetically speaking) than the current version but I've heard so many stories about ugly sites doing better with AdSense that even that's got me worried!

[DaStarBuG]

A change like this will most likely trigger AdSense changes.
However if the content does not change it should be temporary.

I switched from my old vBulletin 3.8 version which was table based to the new 4.0 version which is css based and I had a huge increase in Earnings after the switch.

So change to a more modern frontend does not need to hurt.

[macavity]

Thanks DaStarBuG (I think that might be the first positive experience I've read!)

[netmeg]

Yea I had a two or three week downturn when I completely changed layout and ad locations last year, and then it came roaring back to about 180% of what it was the previous year. And this year was even better (moved to WordPress but kept the same layout) No idea if it was the new layout responsible for the increase, but at least it didn't hurt. Figured it took Google (and any advertisers targeting my sites) a little while to figure it out.

[macavity]

Thanks netmeg, that's also encouraging.