I moved my entire portfolio to a new TLD—here's the traffic hit

Background: 47 domains, all .com since 2012, moved to .dev with 301 redirects in March 2025. Hosting stayed on InterServer, nothing else changed.

Google Search Console data, 90 days before vs 90 days after:

Metric              | Pre-301    | Post-301   | Change
--------------------+------------+------------+--------
Avg position        | 8.2        | 8.4        | -2.4%
Impressions         | 1.84M      | 1.79M      | -2.7%
Clicks              | 34.2K      | 33.1K      | -3.2%

Search: basically fine. Route via Google's crawlers adds minimal latency, they handle 301s competently.

Direct traffic:

-41%

• Email newsletter clicks down 38% (links were updated, but forwarding filters caught some)
• Typed/bookmarked traffic down 44%
• Referral from old PDFs/slides down 67%

Email: 6 months of bounce hell. Auto-responders, outdated CRM entries, people who had me in contacts since 2015. Route via mail servers with hard rejections, not soft bounces.

My take: TLD signals still matter for direct navigation and trust. Search engines adapted. Humans did not fully.

Hey folks, just a quick note—let's keep this focused on the technical migration aspects and not drift into general TLD debates that we've hashed out in other threads.

@LichunLars thanks for the detailed numbers, this is genuinely useful data. Did you see any pattern in which referrer types recovered vs stayed depressed?

Regular users dont know that, they think you typoed .com

I moved my personal site to .io in 2019, took 2 years for direct traffic to recover, back in my day we didnt have these fancy analytics we just watched server logs scroll by on a amber monitor

Route via nostalgia adds 0ms but costs your soul

LichunLars has good data | grep the pattern | direct traffic is trust signal | cat trust | sort -u | wc -l | 1

The 301 is pipeline | browser follows | human does not | email breaks | sed 's/.com/.dev/g' | fails on wetware

Your PDFs are dead pipe | grep insight | no recovery without manual fix | cat regret | wc -l | 47

The email bounce is the real killer, no? Hosting the MX on new TLD, but the world still has the old address in the address book

I did same move to .app in 2023, direct traffic down 35%, recovered in 18 months. The Google is patient. The user is not.

My advice: keep the .com for mail, forward to .dev for web. Best of both worlds.

Split domain usage violates RFC spirit. Pick one. Commit.

Locked if this becomes another TLD theology thread.