Hello /r/Wordpress! First time poster, Long time WordPress sufferer.
**TLDR; My website has lost views from an average of 20k to barely 2k a month, *maybe* due to changing URL & Inexperience. HELP?**
I’m an owner of a website but I’ve been using WordPress for a good 10 years now. After purchasing the site I was working with, and not really knowing much about the “backend” of things, everything was going fine with “grandfathered” settings and the like. Views stayed steady, it was easy enough to maintain.
I moved our host from Sitegrounds to Hostinger, which didn’t really effect anything except save me some money. I changed our theme too, which slightly lowered our daily views but nothing dramatic (I believe this was because of an inflated view counts due to Bots + Endless Scroll). The main problem was in September. I wanted to change our Website Branding/Name etc. We were mostly a wrestling website, but had transitioned into a more pop culture website, but had Wrestling in our name still.
Old Domain: www.twm.news
New Domain: www.distortion.media
Due to pure inexperience, I didn’t know how to do this – What you should do, what you shouldn’t do, 303 Redirects and the like. I tried getting advice from Hostinger, who basically said “Make a new website domain, and use our tool”. I did that, and… I don’t think it worked at all. For example, in April 2023 we had 24k and come January that was around 1.5k.
I don’t really know where to turn, what to do, so i’m hoping someone might shed some light on this or atleast give me a good place to look next. I don’t mind throwing money at this problem, but it’s becoming discouraging to say the least to work on the website in my spare time *(This isn’t my main job, but I’d have liked it to be one day)*
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So are the redirects working? Have you tried them with different browsers to check they don’t give errors?
Did you destroy your SEO? How did you setup the redirects? Did you just change the url or did you build a new site?
If you changed domains, then your urls for each pages changed as well. This means that those old urls that Google used to send traffic to don’t have content on them and are likely returning a 404 status.
When you change domains you need to 301 redirect the old pages to the news ones so you don’t loose your organic traffic.
Here’s an article to check out:
https://www.hostinger.com/tutorials/how-to-move-my-wordpress-to-a-new-domain
Brahhh…that is SEO suicide!
Start doing a 301 redirect immediately for all the old links to the new corresponding article URLs.
Do your Google site console and ensure the sitemap is submitted.
Might also be worth contacting a SEO specialist for your niche, explain what has happened and put a plan in motion to get your new domain authority.
You can signal to google that you’ve moved domains through the Google Search Console (webmaster toolkit). Not sure how long it’s been or what type of domain authority damage has been done, but signalling the domain switch now may still recover some traffic. If you don’t have a 1-to-1 redirect mapping from old pages to new, search console will help you find and redirect those “dead links”.
WordPress is “easy” but it’s not as “simple” as people make it out to be. Not everything is “drag and drop, set it and forget it”. I always recommend consulting with a trusted web developer or working with an agency if you’ve got a vested stake in a website run for profit or some other benefit.
The first thing I’d do is redirect all 404s to your homepage, so that at least your traffic lands somewhere meaningful.
Then it’s going through all the broken URLs and mapping them to pages that exist as redirects.
It’ll take time to rebuild traffic, depending on its sources (crawlers, real people etc). If your traffic is mostly real people then no problem.
It sucks but if you weren’t monetizing the traffic yet, only way is up 🙂
Your basically starting over, SEO wise.
OK. This is what I would try.
“Add” your old domain to your current hosting provider (hope you still control the old [](http://twm.news) domain). Change the [nameservers](https://io.bikegremlin.com/13418/wp-site-domain-nameservers/#2) for it to point to your new provider.
2)
Now, on your hosting account, edit the .htaccess file in the root (usually “public_html” – [how to figure out the paths](https://io.bikegremlin.com/8136/website-migration/#6)) of the [](http://twm.news) site and add the code below at the start (the # stuff is comments, so you can easily do search/remove in case it’s not working):
`# BEGIN NEW REDIRECT EDITS`
`RewriteEngine On`
`RewriteRule ^(.*)$` [`https://www.distortion.media/$1`](https://www.distortion.media/$1) `[L,R=302]`
`# END NEW REDIRECT EDITS`
That should redirect every page from the old domain to the new domain.
3)
After you’ve **tested and confirmed** that it works, change the “302” (temporary redirect) into a “301” permanent redirect ([temporary vs permanent redirects](https://io.bikegremlin.com/5561/optimization-02-redirects/#2.1)).
4)
See what u/bluesix commented about sorting it out in the [Google Search Console](https://io.bikegremlin.com/10169/google-search-console/) as well.
Relja
You fucked the 301 Redirects