Did wordpress kill my site?

I built a site with Dreamweaver, basic html / css stuff, and it ranked on the first page of google for 'home waxing kits'

Look what happened when I moved it over to wordpress...

I even added more content and articles (original stuff) and it still got hit.

 

You did change the 'site visibility' under settings - privacy

 

Yes.

Installed an xml sitemap plugin too, and updated it in my google webmaster tools

 

Did you redirect the URLs of all your existing pages? Or, preferably, change your WordPress settings so the page URLs stayed the same?

 

Seems odd - usually it would have the opposite effect!

 

This is what I'm hoping I did wrong. If it is, then the site might climb back up before too long.

I put an html redirect on the old html pages to the new WP ones, then I got worried about it being hit for duplicate content, so I just deleted all the old html ones.

I may have been a bit foolish

 

Might be too late now, but there is a plugin which adds a .html tag onto page endings to if you had: /contact/ you can make it look: contact.html

I think it's this one:
http://www.introsites.co.uk/wordpress/html-on-pages-plugin.html

I've used it on a few sites and it matches the url exactly - you obviously have to have post name (/%postname%/) on, then amend once your page title has been put in to match what was there originally.

Better solution than redirecting.

 

"Wordpress" won't have killed your site, as such, but the new template and whatnot could have.

Scale back the optimisation of the homepage as it's very heavily "home waxing" orientated at the moment, to the point I actually think it's working against you. Change the footer link anchor text to something other than straight up "Home Waxing". I'd also add a bit more to the main H1 tag (you have multiple on the first page, by the way). "Home Waxing Guide" or something.

You should also either kill these pages or, at the very least, prevent them being indexed. https://www.google.co.uk/search?sou...+remove+excess+hair+and+shape+their+eyebrows"

A plugin like Yoast's will help with this: http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/

 

It's definitely worth doing.

 

A 301 redirect is to tell Google your page has moved and thus prevent duplicate content issues, not create them.

In your .htaccess add:

redirect 301 youroldpage.html yournewpage

 

Had a site effectively deleted for 2 weeks. Put it back up and all the traffic came back and more - that's happened twice now. So don't panic, it would be the redirects that cost you; i would definitely advise speaking to an SEO when it comes to substantial site changes (content, URLs, link structure etc)