How not to lose traffic when moving to a new domain: case "Vse10"

We constantly type texts on the keyboard, so it is not surprising that keyboard simulators are popular. In 2009, the Reactor company created the Vse10 keyboard simulator. About 50 thousand users visited it per month.

In 2013, the Ratatype English-language simulator, oriented to America, was created in the image of Vse10. After 5 years - the Russian Ratatype, which is much more modern than Vse10, we are constantly engaged in its development, and it is also more convenient for scaling. By the way, Ratatype still exists in Ukrainian , French and Spanish .

At the end of 2018, Russian lessons were added to Ratatype.ru , so that it became a full-fledged simulator of the Russian language, and the need to support “Vse10” disappeared. But there were a lot of questions about how to better transfer user data. 1.9 million people are registered at Vse10, many of them go to the site, train and receive speed certificates. Therefore, we decided not only to close Vse10 and set up redirects, but also to transfer the user base with their achievements.

Expectations

It was important for us not to lose our audience. Moving to another domain already carries certain risks, and in our case, not only the domain, but the entire site changed. Before the move, we decided that attendance would go down unambiguously: partial subsidence of organic traffic, reluctance of users to stay on the site with a redirect. We decided that a percentage drop of around 10 would be a good result.

Moving plan

We identified several important stages of the move:

• warn users;
• transfer user bases and their learning outcomes;
• set up redirects;
• send letters of relocation.

Now in order

• First of all, we decided to warn the users of "Vse10" that soon they are waiting for a change. On the main page, under the logo, a message was displayed leading to news about the move.

• Then they started transferring all the achievements of users (training results, certificates and even avatars) and it was not difficult to do this, because Ratatype is designed in the same way as "All10", so the tables with users and their data were identical.
• But it was not without difficulties. Since 2013, projects existed simultaneously, which means that users intersected, their achievements could be different on two projects, and this complicated the work. So for such users, we combined all of their results.
• For 10 years, "Vse10" has collected a decent reference mass and was in pretty good positions on key queries. Therefore, it was important for us to set up redirects correctly in order to transfer at least part of its power to a new site. For this, 301 redirects were used, but paginated to distribute the reference mass evenly.
• And so that users do not get scared or run away after the redirect, they decided not only to redirect them to Ratatype, but to display a message for them about why everything went wrong as they expected.

• Prepared transfer scripts, thoroughly tested all possible options. Thought redirects. And the fun began. We copied the entire base, began its migration to Ratatype, while the work of Vse10 did not stop. We understood that if you just close the site at this stage, then questions from users will start pouring in: “Why does the site not work?”, “When will it work?”, “How was it transferred?”, “And there isn’t my data anywhere”. Therefore, at this stage, "Vse10" continued to exist. Migration lasted almost a day. Everything went well.
• Then it was time to close "All10." Redirects included, that's all. "All 10" is no more. It remains only to transfer those users who trained during the migration. So the next step we brought all the lucky ones who trained on the last day of the life of "All10".
• After all the work on transfers was completed, we sent letters to users of Vse10 about the changes.

In numbers

The attendance of our simulators is very dependent on seasonality. Therefore, for the purity of the experiment, we will compare similar periods year to year. Data “All10” - June-July 2018, Ratatype.ru - June-July 2019. Let me remind you that we expected subsidence of attendance by 10 percent.

• Attendance: + 22% (and from organic + 38%)
• Bounce Rate: -50% (from 48.94% to 19.67%)
• Average time on site: + more than 2 times (from 5 minutes to 12)

There are more users, they spend more time on the site, look at more pages.

We were definitely pleased with the move, although in the beginning there were some concerns. And the super bonus was a significant increase in profits.