Migrating from Wordpress
Last year my sister was complaining about how few visitors her Wordpress website was getting and whether it was worth continuing to fork out $2000 a year on hosting, SEO and agency costs.
How could a simple Wordpress site be so expensive and so ineffective at the same time? A quick look at Chrome's network tab showed multiple megabytes of javascript and images being downloaded - even the font weighed in at 170kb.
No wonder pages took over 6 seconds to load and she was only getting 40 visits a month. No amount of money paid for SEO services would improve this website's organic ranking.
So we decided to migrate her site on to our platform. It took a week to copy the content from the Wordpress site to a new editor site, taking care to preserve all of the text and images, and especially the navigation labels since these were referenced in Google's search index.
A quick DNS change on her domain registrar's account to direct visitors to the new host and we we were live.
Nothing much changed for 2 months other than she was now able to access her site instantaneously where previously she would wait several seconds. She was also able to access it on her mobile phone on a 4G connection in order to show content to customers. The Wordpress site would take at least 20 seconds to respond, if at all.
After about 2 months the number of first time visitors started increasing from 40 a month to 100 a month, and within 4 months of moving to the new platform, Google sent their report that she was almost at 1000 visitors for the month.
That's pretty good for a small niche business to have so many visitors. The real surprise was the number of first time visitors as a proportion of total visits. 90% of her visits were first timers and sure enough a Google search on "Myers-Briggs Insights colours" shows her site first on the organic list.
The key takeaway is that no content was changed in the migration. We copied every one of those 76 pages and a similar number of images. So why does Google now place her first on the list? The only explanation is that the pages perform better with her Core Web Vitals now passing at the 95th percentile.
Google obviously places a high value on performance and uses it as a significant signal in its ranking algorithm.
Another takeaway is that most of her visitors engaged only with the blog posting linked from Google. There wasn't a lot of exploring other content on the site. And that's fine, because at least now she knows there's an opportunity to improve awareness of other content on her site especially on the most popular pages.
And that's why the ideal website building platform includes comprehensive reporting on visit metrics. It's essential for any site owner that wants to reach out to a broader audience that they know their visitors' access patterns and the degree of engagement.
In case you're wondering why we're showing the micropix logo on this site, it's because we converted a 19K png format image to a 500 byte svg, saving 18.5K for every page downloaded. Hopefully, that will be the subject of another case study soon.