Why Did My Website Lose Traffic and How Do I Fix It?

If you want to earn more revenue online, you need to drive traffic to your website. So, what happens when your website loses traffic? It may feel like a time to jump into panic mode, but there are easy explanations for a lower volume of traffic.

These are things you may not think twice about, but they have an impact on your traffic level. On this page, we’ll provide you with six common causes for losing website traffic, and how you can fix it. Let’s get started!

1. You made recent changes to your design or website structure

The most common cause for loss of traffic is that your business made changes to your site. This may seem confusing, as you would think that the changes should increase traffic. After all, you revamp your site in hopes that more people will find it.

This doesn’t mean the changes you made were bad. It may, however, mean that you forgot to integrate certain aspects when you made those changes. Many companies forget to optimize their pages for search engine optimization (SEO) after they update them.

If you do a complete web design overhaul, it is easy to forget that you need to optimize those pages for SEO. Your new design may be great and better for your audience, but you need your page to be optimized for SEO for it to take full effect on your audience.

How to fix it: Optimize your page for SEO.

If you want your website to attract more traffic, you need to make sure your new site is optimized for SEO. This will help you bring back that traffic and get more people to interact on your site.

These behaviors include integrating keywords, building links, optimize your page speed, and cleaning up your coding.

2. Your page is too slow

This happens quite often after you update your site or create a new design. When you add new elements to your pages, you need to make sure they are optimized. If elements like photos, videos, and other items with big files aren’t optimized, they can slow down your page.

Users hate slow-loading pages. They don’t want to wait for a page to load to obtain information. Users want the information instantly and quickly.

If your pages load too slowly, you will lose traffic.

How to fix it: Check your page speed.

To solve this issue, you need to check your page speed. This will help you figure out which elements are affecting your page and how you can fix them. If you want to make the changes on your own, you can use Google PageSpeed Insights to fix your site.

Google will provide you with suggestions on how you can improve your site. If you don’t think you can handle making the changes on your own, you can invest in page speed services from a digital marketing company. A digital marketing company can make the changes for you and get your site back to earning more traffic.

3. You have links to outdated or deleted pages

As time goes on, you will update your site. You will restructure it, redesign it, and move pages around. While this is a great benefit to your business, it can end up hurting your business if you neglect to fully update your pages.

What does this mean? When you redo your site, you often move pages around. You may not move around every page on your site, but you may restructure some of your pages and move them to different spots on your website.

If you linked to that page on a different page, the link becomes broken. It directs users to an error page. Even though you have the newly updated page, you may still have links to the old page you deleted.

This causes your business to lose traffic because you lose credibility. People don’t want to find broken links and pages that aren’t updated.

How to fix it: Check all your links.

The best way to solve this issue is to check all your links. You can use a broken link checker, like Online Broken Link Checker or Dead Link Checker, to figure out where you have broken links.

Then you can update them with the newest links to the page, or delete them completely if that page no longer exists.

4. You aren’t earning backlinks

Backlinks are a crucial part of SEO. You need to earn backlinks to boost your website’s ranking and reach more credible leads. If you aren’t currently earning backlinks, it may explain the drop-in traffic.

These backlinks bring in new traffic for your site. They drive in leads that are interested in your products or services. It isn’t a once and done behavior; you need to constantly earn backlinks.

You may see a decrease in traffic if you aren’t earning backlinks, but your competition is. This means that they will rank higher than you and take some of your traffic.

How to fix it: Continually earn backlinks.

The best way to combat this issue is to resume earning backlinks. You need to constantly reach out to authority sites and get them to link to your page, so you can improve your ranking. If you want to earn backlinks, you should consider creating content.

Content creation is one of the best ways to earn backlinks. It’s an easy way to get authority sites to link to your page. You can share your content with them and ask them to check it out.

If they like what they see, they may use it as a resource on their own page. This helps you build a relationship with that business and earn even more backlinks.  

5. Your website dropped in ranking

Your website’s ranking position has a huge impact on the amount of traffic that comes to your site. The top search result on Google has a clickthrough rate (CTR) of 30-34% (depending on the device used). This number drops to the single digits for the second position.

So, if your website drops in ranking, you could see a significant drop in traffic. Your competitors may be taking actions to improve their site, which causes them to rank higher and bump your listing down. Positioning is crucial, so even dropping down on placement can affect the amount of traffic on your site.

How to fix it: Analyze your competitors.

If you aren’t sure why your ranking dropped, look at the competitors that are ranked above you.

See what they are doing that you might not be doing. Are you earning backlinks? Did you optimize your page for keywords?

Are you ranking for the right keywords? Do you see any elements that help boost their ranking, like videos? When you look at your competition, you may find that they are doing things your business isn’t doing.

It’s an opportunity for you to figure out how to improve your site, so you can outrank your competition again.

6. Your users may change their behavior

There may be reasons for losing traffic that aren’t strongly in your control. User behavior is one of those things. It is hard to control how users will behave and how trends will change.

This is a common thing that occurs for retail businesses. Traffic is high during the holiday season in the winter, but traffic drops dramatically in the summer. There is often a rise and fall in traffic based on the time of year.

It is possible that your business is experiencing this issue, too. You may be seeing a decline in traffic because of the time of year. It’s all based on user behavior, which is something you can’t control.

There also might be trends that affect your business. Some trends can lean people to choose one type of businesses over another. This presents a challenge for your business, as you figure out how to cope with these changes.

How to fix it: Monitor trends and changes.

Some changes may occur every year (seasonal changes), while others may be the cause of something else.

It’s hard to predict how changes will happen and what trends will evolve. The best thing you can do is monitor these things.     You can use things like Google Trends to monitor topics that are trending.

This will give you insight into popular topics and how they can impact your business. You can take note of these changes and trends and adapt your marketing strategy to them to get more traffic back to your site.

Start getting your traffic back today!

It is worrisome to see your website losing traffic after you put in the time and effort to make it great. There are often little changes that spark these effects.

If you don’t feel confident that you can make these fixes, you can always rely on a digital marketing company to help you get your website back on track. At WebFX, we have years of experience driving traffic to websites. We have a team of 500+ experts that will help you make the necessary changes to get your website traffic back.

Our team can help you earn even more traffic, too! If you want to learn more about how you can get more traffic to your website, contact us online or call us today at 888-601-5359 to speak with a strategist. We look forward to helping your business grow!