One of our SEO clients wanted to pause their retainer as they were embarking on a redesign and rebuild of their website. Their plan was to ‘pick back up’ once the new site was live! That led us to compile a list of cases showing just how badly things can go when SEO isn’t baked into redesigns and replatforms.
Below is a screenshot of the monthly traffic value after our 4 years of hard work for said client – you can see why we want to be involved!
So, whether you’re an agency, a consultant, in-house team or you’re just trying to justify SEO involvement in migrations, hopefully this list is for you.
So, without further ado.
Below are 8 examples we found where domains suffered major traffic losses due to poor handling during a migration (domain migration, CMS migration, site redesign, or replatforming). Neglecting SEO in this case can mean a lot of things, but includes things like missing redirects, broken URLs, removed content, and other general oversights (bad redirect mapping seem to be a culprit in many of the smaller migrations).
The data shows reported traffic/visibility drops along with quotes from sources describing the impact. Obviously, in many cases, the businesses suffered lost sales, leads, and visibility until they fixed the issues (or rolled back the changes). The takeaway for anyone considering a site redesign or replatform is clear: involve SEO early and throughout!
WooCommerce’s Woo.com Fiasco (2023 – Domain Change)
What Happened: In November 2023, WooCommerce (the popular e-commerce platform) attempted to shorten its site URL by migrating from WooCommerce.com to Woo.com. The new three-letter domain did not carry over the authority and rankings of the original. Whether due to inadequate pre-migration SEO planning or underestimating the domain change impact, the result was a catastrophic loss of search visibility. Impact: WooCommerce’s organic visibility plunged over 90% immediately after the switch.
Traffic from Google cratered, and the company struggled for months with virtually no improvement on the Woo.com domain (the new site couldn’t rank for the old keywords). Five months later, facing continued losses, they rolled back to the original WooCommerce.com domain. Visibility quickly returned to pre-migration levels after reverting. More here.
LoveKnitting/LoveCrochet to LoveCrafts (2019 – Rebrand)
What Happened: In 2019, knitting and crafts e-commerce sites LoveKnitting.com and LoveCrochet.com merged and rebranded under a new domain, LoveCrafts.com. The migration was not handled with sufficient SEO care. SEO Oversights: Many old URLs did not cleanly redirect to their new equivalents. A blanket (“wildcard”) redirect sent numerous old pages to the new homepage or to non-existent pages, rather than to the corresponding new content. Valuable content was dropped or inaccessible on the new site, and thousands of inbound links from other websites suddenly led to dead ends. Impact: The SEO visibility of LoveKnitting collapsed by ~99% in UK Google rankings after the domain change. Essentially, the site became almost invisible on search. As SISTRIX analysts discovered, “important links… [were] forwarded via a ‘wildcard’ redirect to the new domain where the content cannot be found… Many cases of content being lost”. Completely wiping out years of SEO growth. More detail here.
Today’s Closeout – Complete SEO Collapse (2024 – Replatform)
What Happened: Today’s Closeout, an online wholesale retailer, migrated from a Volusion store to a new BigCommerce platform in late 2024. The migration was poorly executed, triggering a near-total loss of Google visibility. SEO Oversights: Multiple critical errors occurred during this replatform: over 15,000 URLs were mis-redirected (many old links pointed to incorrect destinations or produced 404s) the URL structure was changed carelessly (case-sensitivity issues and loss of SEO-friendly URLs), breaking internal links; entire product categories were altered or disabled without redirection, and thousands of product pages were dropped (marked “out of stock” and recreated with new URLs instead of retaining the old pages). Essentially, the site that launched was viewed by Google as a brand-new site with hardly any of the authority of the old one. Impact: Google promptly deindexed the bulk of the site. Within two months of launch, daily organic clicks plunged from ~40–70 clicks to near 0 – effectively a 100% loss of search traffic. Sales via organic search ground to a halt. By January 2025 the site had almost no presence on Google, prompting an emergency SEO intervention. Before vs. After – Today’s Closeout’s Google Search Console clicks/impressions. In early December 2024 (pre-migration) the site had dozens of daily clicks (and ~10k impressions); by mid-January 2025 (post-migration) it had almost no clicks (~1) and a fraction of the impressions.
White Fuse (2019 – Domain Migration)
What Happened: Migrated its website and domain in 2019. Despite attempting to follow best practices, the migration badly impacted rankings. SEO Oversights: The team believed they had done “all the right things” yet something crucial was missed or went wrong. Impact: Organic traffic and keyword rankings dropped roughly 50% post-migration. This was especially painful because the company thought it had followed the rules. As one report noted, “They lost 50% of their traffic despite appropriate 301 redirects” moz.com ipullrank.com
Non-Profit History Site (2021 – Domain Change)
What Happened: One of the world’s most-read history websites (run by a non-profit organization) underwent a domain migration in the early 2020s. Soon after moving to the new domain, they observed a drastic loss of traffic. SEO Oversights: The specifics weren’t fully detailed publicly, but likely issues include not properly redirecting all old URLs to the new domain. Even if redirects were in place, the sheer scale of the site meant any gaps or delays in Google processing the migration could hurt. Impact: The organisation reported losing over 50% of their website traffic immediately after the domain switch
support.google.com “We recently moved domains and lost over 50% of our traffic. This illustrates that even extremely popular sites are not immune to traffic freefall if the migration isn’t handled with SEO care.
Anonymous (2019 – Redesign)
New management prioritised look and launch speed over preserving the site’s SEO equity. SEO Oversights: The redesign team failed to migrate many existing pages/content and did not implement URL redirects from the old site to the new pages. They essentially “threw away” years of optimised content, backlinks, and on-page SEO elements. Despite warnings, no SEO professional was involved to map old URLs to new ones or to carry over metadata. Impact: Organic traffic tanked overnight after the new site went live. Within days, the company lost roughly half (if not more) of its organic visits. The agency noted the drop was instant and precipitous: “They didn’t protect any historical [SEO]… Traffic tanked, INSTANTLY after going live with the new site” Full story here
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On top of the above, many other businesses have seen avoidable losses from neglecting SEO in migrations. Another high profile example is mtv.fr (the French MTV site) lost nearly all its SEO visibility in 2021 after site changes, and voyage.fr saw a similar fate (both of these were highlighted in SISTRIX data for biggest losers) (source (in French): abondance.com.
The pattern is obviously clear across all of these incidents: if you don’t think about SEO during a redesign or replatform, you risk losing your organic traffic, and it can take months or years to recover, if at all.