How to Fix a Sudden Drop in Website Traffic

If visitors aren’t visiting your site as they used to, your website’s sudden traffic drop should spark concern. Take the drop as showing you that something isn’t working. It could be various issues, something that can be easily sorted, or a major problem. The result, if you don’t sort it out immediately, will mean less sales, lower search rankings, and less income for your business.
We’ve compiled some handy tips to help you sort the issue.

What to Do When Traffic Drops

If you’re regularly monitoring your website statistics, you’ll notice changes in traffic fast. In Google Analytics, check Pages, and in Google Search Console, check Search Console for details of what has occurred and why. If you find that just a few pages are affected, it might be that the issue only relates to those pages. But if your entire site is experiencing less traffic, you may have a bigger issue.

Check Which Traffic Type is Affected

In Google Analytics, go to Acquisition, or read the Traffic acquisition report for a summary of where your visitors come from, and how they reach you.

This includes:
● Organic Search.
● Direct Visits.
● Referrals.
● Paid Ads.
● Email.

Now look at the different types of traffic:
● Organic traffic: This entails visits from search engines, such as Google. SEO problems may cause a sudden drop in website traffic.
● Direct traffic: People reach your site by typing your URL or using a saved link. If there’s a significant drop, this could show that people visit only once and don’t return.
● Referral traffic: People visit other websites, then link to yours. The reason for a decline would largely because of lost links.
● Social traffic: Perhaps visitors from Facebook, Instagram or X aren’t linking to your site as often.
● Paid traffic: This includes ads and paid marketing campaigns. When this type of traffic drops, you need to check whether you’re spending enough on advertising and if your campaigns are effective enough.

Why is My Website Traffic Dropping & How Can I Fix it?

When you’re a small business building a website for your brand, you need steady traffic if you want the site to grow. If that traffic drops, it’s time to fix what’s wrong. You need to find out the cause of the drop. Here’s how to find the issue, and how to fix it:

Google Updates Are the Cause

Google regularly changes how it ranks websites in search results, and every time it does this, your site experiences a sudden traffic drop or increase, depending on the update. Google only updates to improve search results; it’s not doing anything else. It aims to offer more value by providing more traffic to sites that offer more value through better, targeted content, faster-loading websites and content using trusted sources. Unfortunately, if your website doesn’t meet these new standards, you will experience a traffic drop until you make some changes.

Be Proactive!

1. Check for Updates

Follow various tech news sites so you can keep updated about what’s happening, as these will tell you when Google has updated, and what the new changes are.

2. Check Speed

Google uses three speed-related scores to measure sites’ speed for WordPress.
These are:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures load time.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP) measures how fast users click or browse/scroll.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures how stable the pages are when loading.

Measure these by taking Google’s Core Web Vitals test. When you enter your website URL, you receive a report.

Some ways to improve your website speed:
1. Compress large images so they’re quicker to load.
2. Only keep the plugins you use, and only use a few.
3. Enable browser caching.
4. Use a quick, lightweight theme.

3. Provide Expert Content

You know the term E-E-A-T? It refers to “Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust”. That’s what your content should include. Tell the reader who you are, what your credentials are, and link to genuine sources that Google considers authoritative. To show Google you’re trustworthy, you need to do the following:
1. Display your name and qualifications to verify your knowledge on every blog post.
2. Ensure your website’s About and Contact pages are clearly visible and regularly updated.
3. Only link to genuine, trusted sources.
4. Have a secure site (if you have an SSL Certificate, your URL will include HTTPS, not HTTP).

4. Monitor Content & Keywords

You can audit pages that have slow traffic and alter them, so they perform better. Check the pages for outdated content, which you can update, a layout that isn’t easy to read, missing or broken links. Also, check the keywords and use good ones in subheadings and content. Ensure the content is clear and easy to understand.

5. Check for Penalties

People sometimes complain about your site, which makes Google review it manually and sometimes lower your rankings. Never try to cheat the system with backlinks that don’t work, or by stuffing keywords (i.e., using them so often it stops sounding natural). You can check this in Google Search Console by visiting Security & Manual Actions. Click Manual Actions to see whether your site has been penalised. Read the report and make any necessary changes, then submit a Reconsideration Request via Search Console, explaining the issue, what you fixed and how you will avoid this happening in future. Hopefully, your traffic will slowly return.

6. Are Your Analytics Tools Working?

Perhaps your traffic is great, but the tracking isn’t working. Sort this traffic issue, which often occurs after someone has changed the website layout, updated a plugin or edited the tracking code. To fix it, use one of the following browser extensions: Google Tag Assistant or Google Analytics Debugger, or, if you use Google Tag Manager, log in to your account and ensure the tag has been correctly published and set up. If a missing trigger or a paused tag is showing, data may not reach Google Analytics.

7. What About SERPs?

Perhaps the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) has changed. This happens when Google adds new features to the SERP, such as ads, featured snippets or shopping boxes. Unfortunately, this ranks websites lower, or, because the SERP is different, viewers may not click your link as they’re concentrating more on the new features. To fix it, log in to Google Search Console, find Performance to see how often your page shows up in search (that’s the page’s impressions) and compare it to clicks (how often someone visits your site). If the clicks have dropped, it shows that people are seeing your website but aren’t choosing to visit it.

8. Is Your Content Useful?

You need to ensure you provide useful, knowledgeable content, as this makes it easier for Google to display higher in search. Look for common questions your content can answer. Always write short, clear answers in your posts and structure the information so it’s easy to understand. Make the content easy to read, and look good on the page, and this way, more people will click and read what you have to say.

9. Can Search Engines Read & Save Content Easily?

This is crucial if you want search engines to keep your content appearing in search results. Ensure that search engine bots can crawl or search your site easily. If this is the case, they will index your pages, which means they add them to their search. This is vital if you wish your pages to be easily accessible for viewers through Google. All it takes is a small setting or file to block search bots, or missing or broken links or any other reasons your content is confusing to search engines. If any of this happens, they won’t list your pages. To check, sign in to Google Search Console, find Indexing, then Pages. This will tell you whether pages are indexed. If all this sounds a little technical, it’s best to get someone tech-savvy to assist.