Website Traffic Down? Here's How You Investigate To Determine the Cause

It is possible that many different things are to blame for the recent traffic drop. There may be a problem with your website; alternatively, it is possible that the search keywords that are used to lead visitors to your site are not generating as much interest as they once did.

Becoming acquainted with the 14 most prevalent reasons for a loss in website visits is the most straightforward approach to determining the reason for the decrease in traffic on your website. The next step is to resolve any issues with your website or its content that are either preventing new visitors from coming to your site or preventing returning visitors from coming back.

What to Do If Few People Visit Your Website

Find out first whether the drop in traffic is due to a real problem with your marketing or SEO or a tracking error. If it is the latter, you have a problem with your analytics. Measuring the traffic that a website receives may be challenging due to the extensive collection of data involved and the broad number of platforms and tools available for the task.

You are free to use this guidance regardless of whether you are measuring the performance of your website using Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics, or both of these tools. If you examine a few key locations, you can determine whether there is an issue with tracking as the cause of the decline in visitors. Set up Google Tag Manager (for your WordPress website) and Google Analytics to enhance your tracking capabilities and improve your website's performance analysis.

Reasons for Your Few Visitors

1.  Algorithm Updates

The algorithms used by search engines are constantly evolving. In addition, upgrades may either enhance or decrease traffic. Recent drops in traffic may be attributable to one of the following changes we made to our algorithms:

●     Google Hummingbird

●     Google Panda

●     Google Pigeon

●     Google Penguin

2.  Redirects

A vast number of different factors may bring on URL rerouting. It is possible that you changed your domain name without changing your internal links; alternatively, the URL of a page may have been updated, but you forgot to update the links to that page. It is also possible for redirection to be caused by introducing malicious code to your website or by changing the DNS settings. If you see a traffic drop in the number of visitors to your website, check to see if any redirects might be to blame, and remove them if you find any.

3.  Errors in grammar or spelling

Visitors to your website will quickly lose faith in your company if it is filled with grammatical and spelling errors. Not only does this generate a poor first impression on site visitors, but it also makes it difficult to understand what you are attempting to communicate. If you want people to take you seriously, ensure you properly proofread everything before pressing the publish button.

4.  Toxic Backlinks

There are different kinds of links that go back to your website. There is a possibility that some types of backlinks will have a detrimental effect on the quality of the rating for your website. These are referred to as "poisonous backlinks," They might come from many sources, including websites or directories that have been hacked or spammy. If you identify potentially dangerous backlinks on your website, you must take prompt action to remove them as soon as possible.

5.  Your website is HTTP, not HTTPS

Online security is essential, One of the reasons your website traffic is down is that you do not have an SSL certificate installed. A method known as SSL, which stands for "Secure Socket Layer," encrypts data sent between your website and your visitors' browsers. If your website does not have an SSL certificate, users may get a warning about it in their browser, which may cause them to leave your website entirely. 

6.  Geolocation Discrepancies

It occurs when the location information on your server does not match what your visitors' browsers report. It is possible that your server is misconfigured or the people accessing it are concealing their IP addresses by connecting over a virtual private network (VPN) or a proxy server. When determining which results to display, Google considers your current location, your search history, and the kind of device you are using.

7.  Content is Duplicate

Google considers large sections of similar or substantially similar information across several domains duplicate content.

A significant factor in the loss of viewing is the use of information that is repeated. When two or more pages of a website include wholly or mainly similar material, this is known as having duplicate content. It confuses the crawlers used by search engines, which may lead to lower rankings and fewer visits. Before adding anything new to your site, you should search for the same material to avoid this issue.

8.  Changes and Redesigns Made Recently to the Site

It is possible that recent renovations or redesigns to your website contributed to a decline in visitors there. If visitors to your website have difficulty discovering certain content, this may be because you have recently changed your website's navigation or design and style.

Regardless of the cause, it would help if you looked at your site's statistics to establish whether traffic has decreased after the change was made. If this is the case, you will need to make some adjustments to ensure that site visitors can easily find the information they are looking for when they visit your website.

The number of visitors, as well as the locations from where they originated, may be seen quite clearly. In addition, it has a heat mapping capability that can be used for conducting A/B testing. Using a heatmap, you may evaluate which of several possible adjustments is most successfully raising conversions. Please stop second-guessing yourself and sign up so you can see the results for yourself rather than continuing to do so.

9.  Crawl Errors

Reduced traffic may be unpleasant and unsettling. Your website serves as the virtual equivalent of a shop. Nobody will buy from you if customers cannot discover your website. Crawl mistakes are a frequent cause of traffic decline but not the only one.

You may see these errors when search engines have trouble indexing your site. Search engines could not index your site correctly, or users might have difficulty seeing your pages.

Crawl failures may be brought on by several different things, such as changes to your site's structure, issues with your server, or even a bug in Google's crawling algorithm. Crawl mistakes are not irreparable, thankfully.

1.    No New Content

Nowadays, toxic backlinks are the primary factor that contributes to traffic reductions. Your search engine rankings might suffer if you have low-quality backlinks or are spammy. It is possible to identify potentially damaging inbound links using Google's Search Console or an external service such as Ahrefs. If you do, Google has a tool called disavow that you may use to try to get rid of the effect that they have had.

1.    Speed of the Web Page

Site visitors might be lost if the page loads too slowly. If your pages take too long to load, visitors will likely abandon your site without reading your material. To decrease load times and increase user satisfaction, you should begin optimizing your media files immediately. Caching your pages, minifying your code, and using a CDN are a few more options (CDN).

1.    Tracking the Wrong Rankings

The next thing to do is look at your website's statistics and see how people find your page. Tracking the incorrect rankings might give you a skewed image of your website's success. Verify the coding of your site to ensure that you are keeping track of the correct ranks. When analyzing the effectiveness of their website, many companies make rookie errors.

1.    Failure to Update Data

Having outdated information on your site might be the primary cause of a decline in visitors. If you have not updated your website in a while, the information you formerly provided may no longer interest your readers. Keeping your material current is the solution.

1.    Overload on the server

When they notice their site's traffic suddenly decline, many site owners experience worry. Unfortunately, the situation is usually not as dire as it first seems. Falling traffic might result from several factors, including a server becoming overloaded. This occurs when the volume of traffic being processed by your server becomes too high. The problem may be fixed by implementing a content delivery network or upgrading your server (CDN).

Conclusion

There might be many reasons why visitors to your website are staying there for decreasingly more extended periods. It is likely that you have been slacking off on your SEO efforts or that you changed your domain name without first creating a redirect. Both of these things might be the cause of the issue. 

It is possible that you changed web hosting providers or SSL certificate issuers not too long ago. If so, we would like to congratulate you on the move. Fewer customers may patronize your company as a direct result of any of the problems discussed above. 

In this circumstance, the most fruitful course of action for you to pursue would be first to determine what went wrong and then work toward finding a solution to the issue.