Switched from Perl to PHP-driven website. Our hits are now way lower?

[Mateo1041]

Hi everyone,

We recently switched from a Perl-based website to a PHP-based website. The template system for the PHP-based website was redesigned from scratch.

Is there a reason our website statistics are now so much lower after the switch? We use SmarterStats 3.0 on a Windows server (I think our host uses IIS) and our drop in statistics seems to coincide with our switch-over to the new website.

My concern is obviously that I hope the new redesign is not at fault. Would the server simply be reading our visits differently now that we've changed things so much? Is it a Perl vs. PHP thing?

Here's a screenshot for this year's traffic. We switched over in September 2005 and you can see things have really dipped since then. We did receive a lot of hits in March, but our average is around 250,000 or so per month.

http://www.bluewebstudios.com/SmarterStats.gif

(FYI, this is for a client, not for my business which hosts this screenshot)

Thanks,
- Matt.

 

[ChrisHirst]

Where your perl pages redirected to the equivalent PHP page? because if not these are now simply erroring out and bookmarks, pages in SEs etc will no longer be found, consequently leading to a loss of traffic.


Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
Woo Hoo! the cobblers kids get new shoes.
People Counting Systems

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

 

[Mateo1041]

Yes, our Perl pages are being redirected via the main home.pl script. This is the script that used to handle everything.

But you bring up a good idea of something to check.

Any other ideas?