Loss Of Traffic And Orders After Moving To Ps

[NormanMa]

Dear Community,

 

about 35 days ago I closed my Shopify store and officially launched the new store with Prestashop. 

Same domain. 

I switched to PS because of these key features:

- no commissions

- multilanguage

- multicurrency

 

Since then, traffic and especially orders have decreased massively. 

I do not know why. Do you have any idea ? 

Even when advertising on FB 

 

PS Sitemap already submitted to google via webmaster central.

 

 

[Alphaloc]

There might be a number of reasons why 1 shop or platform performs better than another. Get as much data on both as possible, preferably in a package like universal analytics or comparable and try to find out why you're getting less traffic, what channels (organic search, paid search, social, ...) produce less traffic, and so on.

 

Like mdekker said: when you change platforms most of your URLs will be different. Those old spotify URLs were indexed, have backlinks, ... and the new prestashop ones start from scratch. That's why it's important to 301 redirect every old URL to the matching new one, so you let search engines know that the page has moved to this new URL. (and you'll keep most of your ranking signals and thus your position in the search engines) That way you don't loose the time and all the hard work you did on the old shop.

 

Then check if the reduction in traffic matches the reduction in orders. If it matches, the reduction in orders *might* just be a direct consequence of the reduction in traffic. If it doesn't, check your checkout pages and find the essential differences between those and the spotify checkout pages and see how you can improve your prestashop checkout process.

[prestatent]

Agree with the above. We have carried this out twice over the last year, and traffic and sales did not drop dramatically, if at all.

 

The reason I believe is that all the products from the old site had new urls, so we created a whole list of 301 redirects from the old url to the new one and this works great.

 

Do you have your old urls?

 

For each product you probably want something in your .htaccess file like:

RewriteRule ^([a-z]{2})/old-category-name/733-old-product.html$ http://www.mysite.com/new-category/785-new-product.html [NC,R=301,L]

Note: The {2} in the above is for the language. If you don't have this in your url, you can omit.

 

My tuppence worth.

 

Cheers

Edited February 4, 2016 by prestatent (see edit history)