Post-Migration SEO Recovery

Weeks for the easy part, months for the rest. Once the redirects and the missing pages are fixed, Google usually reprocesses the important URLs within a few weeks, and you'll see the first movement in Search Console before you see it in sales.

Full recovery depends on what was lost. A site that only had a redirect problem can be back inside two months. One where collection pages were merged, content was deleted and the navigation changed is a longer job, because some of those pages have to be rebuilt rather than redirected. On the fabric retailer above, most of the non-brand traffic was back within six months, and the last stretch is still being worked on.

A short dip is normal. Google has to recrawl and re-evaluate the site, and that takes weeks rather than days. If you've changed URLs, even with perfect redirects, expect some movement.

What isn't normal is a drop that's still there eight weeks later, or one that's concentrated on a particular type of page: every collection, every blog post, every product in one brand. That shape is a diagnosis. It tells you something specific broke, and it's almost always fixable.

Redirects, first and by a distance. Either not done at all, done after launch instead of before, pointing at the homepage, or chained through two or three hops. On one site the seasonal pages that earned every Christmas were still on last year's URLs, with redirects pointing at products that had since been deleted.

After that: collection and category pages merged or renamed so the old ones return nothing. Blog archives left behind because nobody could see the point. Filtered URLs on the new platform creating thousands of thin pages. Metadata and structured data not carried across. And the odd one that's embarrassing but common, a noindex left on from staging or a robots.txt blocking the lot.

Yes, and it's most of what I see. The job is harder than it would have been at launch, because the old site has gone and Google has already started forgetting the old URLs, but the data is usually still there. Search Console keeps sixteen months of history, which is enough to rebuild the list of what was earning.

The further out you are, the more of the work becomes rebuilding rather than redirecting. A page Google dropped from the index a year ago has to earn its place back rather than just inherit it. That's still doable. It's just slower, and the sooner the first fixes go in, the less of it there is.

By checking what else changed. It's a fair question, and on more than one site the migration got the blame for something else. A brand paid campaign going live in the same month will take clicks that used to arrive free, and the organic line drops without anything being broken. Analytics breaking during the rebuild makes sessions fall whilst Search Console clicks stay flat. Bot traffic inflating the old numbers makes the new site look worse than it is.

So the first pass separates brand from non-brand, compares the same window year on year, and looks for anything that moved at the same time as the launch. Then we fix what the migration actually broke, rather than what it looks like it broke. If you suspect a Google update is in the mix, the Google penalty check on this site is a free fifteen-minute first pass you can run yourself.

It changes the fixes, not the diagnosis. Shopify's redirects are one-to-one with no pattern matching, so a large recovery needs a plan for how thousands of rules get loaded rather than typed in. Collections, filters and the way the platform handles out-of-stock products all have their own traps, and I know most of them from the inside because I build on Shopify as well as doing the SEO. Most of the recovery work I've done has been on Shopify stores, and I can make a lot of the changes myself rather than handing a list to your developer. Shopify SEO is its own page if you want the detail.