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

We hired a team and designed the theme for https://www.princessly.com 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.

https://postimg.cc/f31nF1B0 (Sep 9, 2020-Nov 19, 2020 comparison against previous period)
https://postimg.cc/62RJNzmb (Overal traffic drop by 49.75%)
https://postimg.cc/RJBrCKrS (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: https://www.princessly.net

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 Princessly.com 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.

https://postimg.cc/jnQpD2Kz (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!

 

Are you really not seeing the difference in basic SEO of those 2 sites?
That .net site is way better optimized, much better accessible, and much better overall (for SEO and for humans both)

 

Yeah, I would go with .net brother

 

Can't you keep both sites?
Keep your original magento site on dot com
Build a second one on shopify using dot net
Don't make the second site identical, its already very different though.
Keep the shopify site for marketing etc purposes.
With the SEO you got on shopify site, I don't think you will get your rankings back.

Was there a reason for moving to shopify? Some special feature which magento did not had or something like that?

 

That sucks!

 

Thanks for the tip and yes that's true but the traffic drop happens overnight immediately after the migration, so I don't think it's related to Google search rankings. If you look closely at the screenshots I provided, you will find that traffic dropped across ALL sources, including social, direct, referral, and search. It's an overall drop. So I don't think it's something related to Google search rankings.

Nonetheless, you do have a point there. It doesn't help much here though.

Yes, I can keep both sites but the main domain Princessly.com has been migrated over to Shopify thus with the backlinks profile. Yes, Magento becomes a pain to maintain. That's the reason why we migrated over to Shopify.

Can you do the SEO for Princessly.com? We can arrange something perhaps by paying you.

But still, we are still not sure why the traffic dropped immediately after the migration. It's a mystery as far as I can see.

 

@TheDataPlanet.com
If the traffic has fallen from all sources, it means that site is not "reachable" at times.
The server is not responding every now and then.

I have never worked with shopify, but they are only a niche host, hosting only ecommerce sites, using their own script.
Other than that, they are just a host.
This means, they are hosting many many sites on their starter/medium packages, many thousands.
Lots of these sites are from people like you, who already have an established business, large amounts of traffic hitting the site,
and they migrated to shopify like you did.

Now all of you, thousands of you, are on same shared server, with 100,000 products loaded,
multiple bots indexing your sites, search traffic coming, referer traffic coming,
and shopify servers are giving up I think.

This is why that drop has happened in traffic.
People are seeing this message, site not reachable, or a timeout error.

Use a site uptime monitoring service for 2-3 days, or ping from your own laptop.
Even better is, if shopify allows you to upload a text/html file directly, do that,
and hit this file directly.
You don't need any content in the file, just put one number one word, anything. Put a small number.

Example, make a file, "testHit.html"
Content of file is just a number "1"
Upload to your store somewhere, make sure to get the URL where the file is stored.
Now keep opening every 1 minute or 5 minutes or so,
yourDomain.com/folder/testHit.html

Put a PHP script in dot net server, set it in cron.
Use this php script to hit that file on dot com server.
Log the response time.
Its a plain text/html file you are hitting, meaning no connecting to database, no processing, server simply has to return the file.
So response should not take more than 1 second.
Everytime this php script cannot access that file, log it somewhere.
These are the times when that shopify server did not responded at all.
Everytime response time is more than 2 seconds, log that also.

I am certain that this is the problem you are having.

By the way, all of this exercise is just to make sure what is happening.
Its really not going to improve anything.
And when you will provide the data to shopify, complaining that server is down or not responding, they will probably ignore you...
Like how godaddy ignores its customers...

Also, what did you mean by "dot com domain is configured for shopify"?
You can point it back to your server, simply change the nameserver records in your domain control panel,
and remove the 301 codes from htaccess file.
It will take some time for google etc to reindex the old site again, but referer traffic will start coming back immediately.

After this use shopify nameserver info in your dot net domain.
Then contact support of shopify and request them to change the domain to dot net instead of dot com
They simply have to add an alias in your hosting records file.
Now the dot net domain will start pointing to shopify site.
And dot com goes back to your magento site...

 

@jett

You have a solid point and method here. It's very much appreciated. I'll try to do the test as you lay out.

However, what Shopify offers is not a server where I can upload a file and access it directly under my domain. If you look at the source code of https://www.princessly.com and you will see ALL the files are served from their CDN such as https://cdn.shopify.com/...., can I still do the test as you designed?

Nonetheless, I can still ping the home page of https://www.princessly.com directly every minute or so and note down the response time if any at all and see if there's anything strange? I'm using a 3rd party uptime monitoring service for this job. Is this OK?

 

Don't hit the homepage, that defeats the purpose, because loading homepage requires all sorts of processing, connecting to database etc, so you will not know if server itself is down or is it processing overload.

Hit this file instead:
http://www.princessly.com/robots.txt

This is a plain text file in your root directory.
To save bandwidth, configure the hitting script to download only 1-2 bytes from that file. Idea is to check if server is responding or not. 1-2 bytes is enough to know that.

Also note, ping is different, downloading file is different.
Ping will only check if server is up and running.
Downloading file will tell if its actually serving files.

We want to download file, to make sure that apache (or whatever server they are using), that software is not causing the delay and people are able to reach the website properly.

 

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@TheDataPlanet.com
I also noticed one more thing, which might hurt SEO.
Your HTTP site is not automatically redirecting to HTTPS version.
You can access both versions separately.

 

OK I'm implementing that on my own server to download the file and find out if it's online every minute or so for a few days and I'll let you know.

In the mean time, I have a theory that Shopify is probably discriminating among different visitors or IPs, some of whom might get blocked before reaching my site? Is it possible?

 

I tried http://www.princessly.com/robots.txt and it's redirecting to https://www.princessly.com/robots.txt

Seems to be correct?

 

@TheDataPlanet.com
Its a possibility that shopify is banning certain ips, but generally this is done for ips of turkey, somalia etc.
These won't affect sales.
But in your case, your overall sales are affected.

Also, I can still access the http site normally, on IE, Firefox and on Chrome, all of those.
No redirection to https