Anyone get a boost in traffic on moving to Xenforo?

[Jon12345]

Xenforo seems to me to be (probably) the best forum software out there. I have one site with vBulletin 3.8 and one with Xenforo. I much prefer the user experience with the latter.

Has anyone here switched from another forum software provider and found they got a bump in traffic?

 

[Sim]

I made a post about our experience after migrating an archived forum (ie read only - no new posts allowed) from vB 3.8 to XF 1.5 a couple of years back - https://xenforo.com/community/threads/drag-and-drop-files-to-upload.107406/post-1263975

Summary: instant and permanent increase in visitor numbers and visits.

One of my other sites also saw a long term increase in traffic after the upgrade from vB 3.8 to XF 1.5 in 2016 - but it wasn't quite as dramatic:



This one was an older, well established site, running since 2003 and growth since migrating to XF has been sustained and is now at its highest level ever.

Despite my own experience, I don't think moving to new forum software is necessarily going to have a dramatic impact on site traffic - the results will depend on so many other factors as well.

 

[JoyFreak]

I made a post about our experience after migrating an archived forum (ie read only - no new posts allowed) from vB 3.8 to XF 1.5 a couple of years back - https://xenforo.com/community/threads/drag-and-drop-files-to-upload.107406/post-1263975

Summary: instant and permanent increase in visitor numbers and visits.

One of my other sites also saw a long term increase in traffic after the upgrade from vB 3.8 to XF 1.5 in 2016 - but it wasn't quite as dramatic:

View attachment 216997

This one was an older, well established site, running since 2003 and growth since migrating to XF has been sustained and is now at its highest level ever.

Despite my own experience, I don't think moving to new forum software is necessarily going to have a dramatic impact on site traffic - the results will depend on so many other factors as well.

Completely off-topic, but can I ask why you are still on XF 1.X and not moved to 2.X?

 

[Jon12345]

@Sim Thanks for that post. I will take a look at the thread. Nice forums by the way!

 

[Sim]

Completely off-topic, but can I ask why you are still on XF 1.X and not moved to 2.X?

We migrated from vB 3.8 to XF 1.5 back in 2016. XF 2.0 wasn't released until late 2017.

FWIW, we are actually still on XF 1.5, but only because our sites are very heavily customised - we're still working on migrating all of our custom addons to XF 2.x

I do have several newer forums that are running the latest version - but they are quite small (and one is a private forum with very low traffic).

 

[JoyFreak]

We migrated from vB 3.8 to XF 1.5 back in 2016. XF 2.0 wasn't released until late 2017.

FWIW, we are actually still on XF 1.5, but only because our sites are very heavily customised - we're still working on migrating all of our custom addons to XF 2.x

I do have several newer forums that are running the latest version - but they are quite small (and one is a private forum with very low traffic).

Ok, that's understandable. Was just curious, thanks for your response!

 

[ENF]

We were a convert from vb3.8 to XF, somewhere around xf1.2. The key improvement for us was member interactions which spiked activity which led to a permanent, steady growth. We too are still on xf1.5 but will soon move to xf2 now that we have most all components updated so the transition is smooth and we don’t lose any functionality. I predict that with improvements in xf2, we’ll see another spike in interactions. Of course, content matters and along with xf2, we’re expanding our content coverage to include more core subjects. However, we still have a bunch of older content that still ranks really high in our niche that bring in new members consistently every month.

Summary: Moving to xf gave us the needed tools to increase member interaction which lead to greater things.