Site migration recovery: +25.9% traffic recovered, 258% ROI

The Situation

A US-based user-generated content site running on Xenforo migrated its platform independently — and lost approximately 26% of organic traffic in the process. Pre-migration, the site was receiving 27,000 daily sessions. The client came to us after the drop had already occurred.

The Challenge

Standard migration recovery work assumes a clean URL inventory. This one did not have one. The client had performed the migration using only their internal database, which lacked records of custom platform pages. Those pages — roughly 550 URLs — had generated meaningful traffic but were never mapped to redirects.

Initial recovery requests included access to the old website subdomain and Google BigQuery data — both critical for reconstructing what had been lost.

The Approach

Multi-source URL reconstruction

Rather than working from a single source, the team assembled a comprehensive URL inventory from five independent sources:

• Old website crawls
• Google Analytics historical data
• Google Search Console performance data
• BigQuery internal database exports
• Backlink analysis

This identified the ~550 previously unknown pages responsible for the traffic loss.

Prioritized redirect implementation

Pages were ranked by traffic contribution to maximize developer resource efficiency. High-traffic URLs were redirected first, allowing partial recovery to begin before full implementation was complete.

Results

The site recovered to pre-migration traffic levels. At an ARPU of $0.059, the 210,600 monthly sessions recovered generated $12,425 in recurring monthly revenue — against a one-time project cost of $4,800.