Q: Traffic dropped 30% three days after our move. Should we roll back the migration?

Q: Traffic dropped 30% three days after our move. Should we roll back the migration?

A: I know it's scary, but please don't pull the trigger yet. Short answer: an early dip is expected, and rolling back can do more damage than the dip itself.

Long answer: After a clean migration, Google has to recrawl, re-evaluate, and reassign signals to new URLs. A temporary drop of 10–30% for a few weeks is normal even when everything's done right. If you panic-rollback, you force Google to reverse all of that, then reverse it again when you re-launch — two migrations' worth of turbulence instead of one. Roll back only for a true technical failure (broken redirects, noindex, 500s).

The fix:
— Confirm 301s, canonicals, robots.txt, and status codes are all clean
— If clean, hold steady and monitor weekly, not hourly

Next step: run a technical checklist; if it passes, give it 4–8 weeks before judging recovery.