Case Study 03
Post-migration recovery: from -41% to -3% in 60 days
The Challenge
The Approach
Ran Screaming Frog + Sitebulb crawls and pulled 30 days of server logs. Mapped every old URL → new URL, and identified which pages Googlebot was still requesting (highest priority to redirect).
Built and deployed 1,240 clean 301 redirects. Killed 6 redirect chains (max hop reduced from 4 to 1). Fixed all internal links to point directly at the final URL.
Canonicalized parameterized URLs. Blocked useless faceted-navigation paths in robots.txt. Removed 3,400 thin/duplicate pages from the XML sitemap. Crawl budget waste dropped 71%.
Deferred non-critical JS, added fetchpriority='high' to hero images, moved to responsive image srcsets, and inlined critical CSS. LCP: 4.2s → 1.9s. CLS: 0.31 → 0.04. INP: 620ms → 180ms.
The Results
| Metric | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Organic traffic (vs pre-migration) | -41% | -3% | +38 pts |
| Pages returning 200 (from map) | 62% | 99.4% | +37 pts |
| Core Web Vitals (URLs passing) | 62% | 94% | +32 pts |
| Crawl budget waste | 58% | 17% | -71% |
| Referring domains recovered | 24% | 89% | +65 pts |
Takeaway
Migrations don't have to kill SEO — but recovery requires forensic-level auditing, not guesswork. The client is now on a monthly technical-SEO retainer, and organic traffic has grown 12% above pre-migration baseline.
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