One Month After Switching From vBulletin To XenForo...

I've been more or less flooded with people asking how I like being on XenForo after being on vBulletin for so long... with the questions ranging from anything from just how do I like it in general to more technical aspects like, "How has it affected traffic, server resources, etc."

Now that we've been on it for a month, I'll compile some data and show how things have changed.

First of all, it's not a scientific analysis, I'm just taking the month since we migrated, and comparing it to the same number of days before the migration (starting with the same day of the week, and using the most recent date range that isn't affected by holidays).

So... here's stuff from Google Analytics (green stuff means better, red means worse):

High Level Stuff
Visits: +9.25%
Unique Visitors: +12.08%
Pageviews: -4.64%
Pages / Visit: -12.70%
Average Visit Duration: +37.56%

As you can see, we are seeing more visitors, with a MUCH longer visit duration, but with less page views (less pageviews is probably because popular functions like private message listings and the old UserCP aren't needed anymore since you can access the stuff from the pop-up menus directly on any page and bypassing the middle page). Also a lot more AJAX used, so less total page reloads.

Visitors By Geographic Location (top 10 countries)
United States: +12.20%
United Kingdom: +18.00%
Canada: +15.60%
India: +0.99%
Australia: +17.51%
Indonesia: -5.42%
Pakistan: -3.42%
Philippines: +13.89%
Germany: +15.71%
Romania: +29.42%

This mostly has to do with policy changes, and not the software itself (since we are doing a better job at mitigating low quality users/content now).

Referrals
Organic search: +6.22%
Facebook: +81.76%
Twitter: +155.76%
Google+: +46.15%

Social Engagement (use of like/+1/tweet buttons)
Facebook: +20.00%
Google+: +210.10%
Twitter: +6.11%

Site Speed
Average Server Response Time: -24.77%
Average Page Download Time: -53.83%

Other
New User Registration: -9.68%

This has to do with the new stuff in place that blocks bots and low quality users from registering.

Google Webmaster Tools
Crawl stats in Google Webmaster Tools show page download speed averages about 2.5x faster:



Crawl stats in Google Webmaster Tools show page download speed averages about 2.5x faster, and a TON more pages being crawled (342,353 pages spidered yesterday, vs. 70,966 on the last day we were on vBulletin). Part of this I'm sure is simply different URLs, but a large part is also the time Googlebot needs to download a page is much faster, so they can get more (without them thinking they are wrecking your site).

Edit/update...

Added the full charts for the last 90 days... the red shade was on vBulletin, the blue on XenForo... it seems like Googlebot as settled down spidering ~750,000 pages/day now. And clearly you can see the pages are rendering drastically faster.



Facebook Insights



January 20th was the migration date, at which point you can see more Facebook users using the site.



Facebook Connect needs 4x less API calls for us now because we use 4 web servers. vBulletin has a known issue where it saves Facebook sessions to the web server, rather than the user session (which we reported in October, 2011 and it's still not fixed). http://tracker.vbulletin.com/browse/VBIV-13376

Conclusion
I've actually been surprised we have seen no drop-off whatsoever on search engine traffic (I actually was expecting a temporary drop while Google respiders the new site).

Servers are now needing about half the resources to do the same job.

If I could go back in time and redo the vBulletin -> XenForo migration (even starting before I had to rewrite all our custom stuff), would I still do it? Absolutely yes. It's one of the best decisions (although a tough one) I've ever made. The site is faster, uses less resources, and it's a much better platform to build custom stuff on top of (which is a huge factor for me).

 

I built a custom importer for the job (I needed one that was faster), so it retained all primary IDs so redirects are easy... we just have a couple rules in our Nginx config that handle them (since the primary keys are retained, we don't have to look anything up).

This is the importer I used:

https://marketplace.digitalpoint.com/a-r-f-i-a-really-fast-vb4-importer.908/item

 

Yep... while I don't use XenForo's internal redirection system, it should work fine.

 

Less time is better as far as that metric goes.

 

Yeah, I'm pretty happy overall... not just the XenForo migration, but also some of the policy changes we implemented at the same time and some new features we didn't have on the old site at all got rolled out (digital goods marketplace for example).


I actually have some pretty interesting ideas of things I want to build now that the migration is done and I'm done rebuilding functionality we had on old site... now I can start working on completely *new* functionality.