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We migrated our old URL (www.nyc-officespace-leader) to a new domain (https://www.metro-manhattan.com) on April 5th, 2018. The new domain has been registered to us since 2013.

Within 5 days web traffic feel about 90%. At about 21 days, web traffic increased to about 75% of it's previous daily traffic. It has been stable in the last week.

Is this normal? Should traffic recover? I have read it can take up to about 2 months. A feedback or advice would be greatly appreciated! We followed the below procedures for the switch:

  1. Create "splash" page with h1 and text
  2. Remove redirection
  3. SSL for www.metro-manhattan.com
  4. Verify the domain metro-manhattan.com on Google search console
  5. Create two subdomians to "simulate" the redirection/migration and test redirection
  6. move the reduced website from subdomain 2 to www.metro-manhattan.com
  7. Apply the partial redirection on production
  8. Submit a sitemap on google webmaster tools for www.metro-manhattan.com
  9. Apply complete redirection from nyc-officespace-leader.com to www.metro-manhattan.com
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  • Where are you viewing traffic? http and https are viewed are two different properties in all Google Tools. You reference in #9 a redirection from a non www site to a www site... which can also be a different property depending on analytics setup.
    – Justin Marshall
    May 1, 2018 at 6:12

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I've never experienced the same outcoming after a migration; each site is different and also are the organic competitors.

It's common to lose some traffic just after the change but if you made a good migration and the new site is better than the previous one, you will recover and grow faster in about 4/6 weeks (based on my experience).

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It's difficult to get a straight answer without checking the site but in order to help I'll give you the steps I'll follow to make a successful migration:

  1. Check robots.txt for disallowing instructions
  2. Check nofollow tags in the header
  3. Check analytics codes
  4. Update internal links with the new URLs
  5. Check canonical tag
  6. Check duplicate content
  7. Check 301 redirect from old deleted URLs
  8. Check www and https redirect
  9. Create and submit new sitemap (Search Console)
  10. Check traffic, performance, and rankings (Analytics & Search Console)
  11. Check indexed pages (Search Console)
  12. Check error log (5XX, 4XX, ...)
  13. Check indexed old domain URLs evolution
  14. Check site performance (speed)
  15. Check mobile-friendly
  16. Check structured data
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