Traffic to blog home page is going down after changing my WordPress Theme

[saultienut]

I recently changed my wordpress theme from a standard free theme to a newer theme. The home page I switched up a bit adding more calls to action to some of our top posts and leading people to popular categories and so on. This greatly improved the usability of our site as it allowed us to highlight new posts. The previous free template simply listed 10 of our most recent posts on a page with small snippets and then you had to move to the next page to keep reading.

Since switching my theme the blog traffic has stayed relatively level. That being said, the specific posts traffic is going up a lot whereas the organic traffic to the blog homepage is now nearly depleted.

Is this a common thing to happen or is there anything I can do to fix this issue?

[BlueprintMarketing]

If you don't mind me asking did you run a complete crawl of the site prior to changing the theme?

I only ask because very unlikely that the identical URL structure will remain considering all the different modifications to photographs and pages.

if you have the original version you could run a screaming frog test on both the original and new site?

https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

you could do this by taking your backed up version of your old site and uploading it to pantheon.io that would allow you a free staging server allowing you to not have to worry about duplicate content and perform tests like this.

Respectfully,

Tom

[saultienut]

Thanks for your response Thomas. The redesign was simply the theme and none of my URL's have changed or anything..so what would I need to have 301 redirects for?

[BlueprintMarketing]

301  use page to page 301 redirects when Migrating a New Site From Development To Live

• https://moz.com/blog/make-or-break-your-site-migration
• https://moz.com/blog/website-migration-guide
• https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93633?hl=en
• https://moz.com/ugc/301-redirects-migrating-a-new-site-from-development-to-live

You need to have page to page 301 redirects

bigger photo https://i.imgur.com/PsM0S7N.jpg

I can get very into depth on this if you'd like just let me know if this answers your question if it does not I am more than happy to go farther into detail.

Look for internal redirects that were not made or are still showing a 301 should be searched and replaced the new URL. And of the 301 Redirect Logic in place.

You can use deep crawl,  screaming frog SEO spider & Moz to find these 301 or lack of 301

keep a lookout for the 404 status as that will be your old age that carried link equity and is now pointing the abyss you want to redirect that page to your new press rumbling structure.

** Things that will help you with this process**

Make 301's

• https://searchengineland.com/create-301-redirect-map-203248

• https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93633

• https://www.rapidtables.com/web/tools/redirect-generator.html

• https://www.htaccessredirect.net/

• Nginx is almost as popular as Apache and in my opinion better here is an htaccess converter to Nginx

• https://winginx.com/en/htaccess

• WordPress  site structure

• https://yoast.com/wordpress-seo-url-permalink/

• ** Understanding and finding 404's**

• https://yoast.com/thoughts-404-not-found/

• **Changing WordPress permalinks **

• https://yoast.com/research/permalink-helper.php

• Running a site crawl and checking the current status of your URL's

• https://www.deepcrawl.com/

1. https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
2. https://headmasterseo.com/

• (1&2 Checklists of up to 500 URLs. It's quick, easy and free).

  ** You can always use Moz**

• https://analytics.moz.com/pro/manage-campaigns

• or

• https://analytics.moz.com/pro/research/crawl (faster)

• Checking the current status of any URL any time.

• https://varvy.com/tools/redirects/

• https://httpstatus.io/

Sincerely,

Tom

PsM0S7N.jpg