I migrated my blog from WordPress to a static site. Traffic dropped 60% for three weeks. Here's the recovery checklist.

Moving off WordPress to a faster, static Next.js setup felt like a clear win — until Google effectively stopped sending traffic for nearly a month. Here's exactly what caused it and what brought it back.

The Migration

I exported every post from WordPress, converted them to MDX, and deployed the new site on Vercel. Page speed improved immediately. Search visibility did not.

The Drop

Within days, organic traffic fell sharply and stayed down for about three weeks. The likely cause wasn't the new site being worse — it was that Google hadn't re-indexed it yet, and in the meantime old URLs pointing nowhere were quietly losing their authority.

The Recovery Checklist

In order of what mattered most:

1. Submit the new sitemap to Google Search Console immediately — don't wait for it to be auto-discovered.
2. 301-redirect every old WordPress URL to its new equivalent. Any old URL returning a 404 instead of a redirect throws away the ranking signal that page had built up.
3. Add a dateModified field to page schema so crawlers can see the content is current, not abandoned.
4. Explicitly allow AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, etc.) in robots.txt if you want re-indexing by AI search systems too, not just traditional Google Search.
5. Update internal links so they point to the new URL structure directly, instead of relying on redirects to carry the link equity.

The Result

Traffic recovered over the following weeks as the redirects and sitemap resubmission propagated through Google's indexing. The technical improvements from the migration (faster load times, cleaner markup) started paying off once the site was properly re-crawled.

What I Learned

A faster, cleaner site doesn't automatically mean better rankings on day one — migrations create a temporary blind spot while search engines catch up. The size of that dip is almost entirely controllable by how thorough your redirect map and resubmission process are. Skipping either one turns a manageable few-week dip into a much longer one.