Earlier this week, I moved my blog from Dreamhost to Media Temple. The change seemed to go smoothly enough, although the site was unstable for a couple of days (seems to be settling now though). However, since the move, the site has had a dramatic drop in hits. Normally it gets over 10,000 hits per day, but since Tuesday it's been sitting around 5,000 hits per day. Now, URL structures are all the same, the site is pretty much as it was when before I moved it. Can anyone shed any insight into why it might be under performing?
it shouldn't have hurt your site to move hosts if you did it right. If your site was down for a little while, just give Google time to come back and reindex it. It should go back up to where it was within a week or two. You could also open a Google sitemaps account to see if they are giving you any error messages. But I'd just wait it out a bit to be honest.
You probably just got unlucky and the google bot visited while your site was down. Just try giving it some time.
Sometimes, in order to advance you have to take a small step back. It freaks me out whenever I see my stats drop. If the server performance is good and you haven't left anything out, (like a subdirectory), it should just be a temporary hit.
There's no luck involved in transferring a site properly so that there is no downtime while the DNS propagates. But you're right that the OP just needs to wait for a bit and all should be good again.
it does happen. I shifted my site to another host and the traffic dropped considerably... and the traffic dropped considerably... but then.. gradually the traffic starts increasin.. as you start building more content
Were you tracking the source of your traffic? External links? Google? Yahoo? If Google, what search terms and what rankings did you have? Compare that to now.
Guys thanks for your kind support. It looks like we'll be playing a waiting game for a while until Google reindexes the site and we're back in business. I'm sure the site will pick up eventually, I'm just having trouble convincing my wife that things will return to normal - she want's to move it all back to the old host. I think it's too late for that!
hmm, i didn't know switching a host can do so much trouble? But i guess the drop would only be temporary. since it's the natural traffic that returns to your site. it's only a matter of time that it will return.
Hmmm......it shouldn't happen right? I mean even if googlebot visited your site while it is down, your indexed pages should try rank the same. It usually won't drop overnight. Maybe it is becuase your site is down and your visitors could not access your site. May I know where does your traffic usually come from? Search engines or direct?
have her read this thread then, hosts have nothing to do with traffic unless your host is inaccessible by most ppl which doesnt seem to be the case now.
If the page isn't there when Googlebot comes by it's not going to keep it in the index, why would Google want to send visitors to pages that don't exist anymore? Next time it comes by it'll put the page back into the index.
It doesn't have to be, all you have to do is maintain the site on both hosts at the same time until the DNS propogates completely (48 hours to be completely safe). Then you'll never have this problem.