Before devising a solution, you need to understand the problem. This is similarly applicable when trying to retrieve website traffic after an unexpected decline. Website traffic decline often worries website owners, after all, conversion depends on an active website. To alter website traffic decline, you first need to analyse the problems and then work to resolve them.
How to Diagnose Website Traffic Decline?
A website’s traffic may decline due to multiple reasons, while most of them being technical ones. A website is a complex thing, what appears on the frontend is just a fancy sorted version of several files and folders holding technical data for website functionality. Thus, many reasons can collectively affect a website’s traffic decline. Here is what you need to diagnose the reasons for website traffic decline:
Google Analytics
This tool helps you analyse your website performance and provides tips and solutions to improve it. PageSpeed tool not just tests website traffic for desktop versions but also mobile responsive versions of websites.
Google Search Console
This tool provides you with a detailed analysis of your website performance. From SEO technicalities to crawl statistics, the tool covers every aspect.
These tools are highly essential for you to diagnose your website’s performance and understand the reason behind the traffic decline.
How to Recover Website Traffic Decline? Common Reasons and Solutions
Now let’s discuss some of the common reasons derived by these tools after analysis of websites that lost traffic unexpectedly and their remedies.
Changes Done to the Website
Changes done to a website can highly affect a website’s traffic. You may have changed the website’s layout, revamped a few sections or maybe changed the CTA’s copy. Such changes can make an evident difference to the website’s traffic; thus, it is important to first investigate any recent changes that you made to the website. This can save a lot of your time as by analysing recent changes you can dig into the technical problems that might have occurred after.
Technical Issues
If no changes were made recently and your website isn’t doing well still, you need to dig into the technical aspects. These include the SEO elements of the website that may not be up to date.
A website may not be doing well due to broken links, unwanted redirections and other code-related issues. You need to resolve these by adjusting redirections and creating the right traffic channels for the users.
Poor On-page Optimisation
On-Page optimisation includes content, metatags, and links for your website. If these are not done right, the website may see traffic decline. You need to check the copy of your website for the right keywords, metadata of content and images and backlinks of your website. Make sure everything is on point, a spammy backlink can affect your website’s ranking on the search engine which causes traffic decline.
To recover the website traffic decline, you need to write a good and engaging readable content. Moreover, you need to watch out the website’s backlinks.
New Competition
A brand-new competition in the market may become the reason for a website’s traffic decline. To overcome this, you need to come up with something good and new to attract back your website users.
Algorithm Updates
With evolving search engines, algorithm updates are now a common and frequent thing for websites. These updates enable search engines like Google to improve their search results and facilitate the users in the best possible ways. New updates bring in new rules for the webmasters to optimise their websites, but if your website was well optimised before the update, it may not see any traffic decline. Algorithm updates affect a website’s performance in the most unexpected ways, some witness a decline, and some remain the same no matter what.
To resolve this decline, you just need to sit back and relax until you see some serious Google penalties being imposed on the website. Just optimise later and in better ways!
Website traffic decline can be complex, but by knowing these tools, the common reasons and their solutions, you can now dig into levels of website diagnoses to recover. Website’s traffic recovery just requires skills that you need to master!
Was this guide helpful? Feel free to comment below!
