Problematic SEO – Causes of a sharp drop in traffic on your site

A sudden drop in website traffic is one of the most frustrating situations that a webmaster (website owner) can face. It’s even more annoying when the webmaster is hard at work on the site, its content, and improvement, and then he sees the traffic curve going down sharply. This can lead to panic and a severe deterioration in mood.

There are many reasons why your website traffic can plummet. In today’s article, we’ll look at four main reasons that can have a negative impact on your website traffic, as well as ways to deal with them.

See also: How to Grow Construction Business Online?

Reason #1: Your site has slowed down

In our SEO articles, we talk a lot about the importance of website performance. The reason this topic recurs all the time is that the performance of your site is one of the most important factors to consider in order to ensure the success of a site. If the site loading time has increased, this may be the reason for an unexpected drop in traffic. People don’t like slow sites. Basically, people will not tolerate slow-loading sites, and if your site is slow, your visitors will leave and most likely not come back.

There are many factors that can affect the loading time of your site. However, if you’re trying to figure out why your traffic is dropping, focus on your latest changes. Here’s what could be causing it:

• You have recently made changes to the site code for SEO.

• You have just redesigned your site. An overhaul of the site layout and design can have a major impact on load times, especially if the template is not optimized.
• Problems with your hosting provider. If your hosting is experiencing technical difficulties, this will cause your site to slow down.

Now you should focus on figuring out if the performance degradation is the cause of the drop in traffic to the site.

The first thing you should do is measure your site’s load time. If the results look bad, you will need to work on fixing the problem. After improving your download speed, monitor traffic changes with your analytics tool. If you see traffic recovering, then that was the cause of the performance issue.

Reason #2: You recently redesigned your website for SEO

As a diligent webmaster, you will always try to improve the design of your site, perhaps even periodically redesigning it from scratch. Your site will look amazing, but all the fancy new elements you add can affect its performance.

If you’ve recently made changes to the design of your site and have started noticing a drop in traffic, there could be several explanations for this:

• The new design slowed down your site.

• Users don’t like the new layout (and/or design) and move on to other sites.

Figuring out which of these two categories you fall into is fairly simple. As for the first reason, you need to check the performance of your site, and if it does not meet the norm, then it’s time to start optimizing.

However, if your site’s performance looks just fine, chances are that users just don’t like your new design. This may be a blow to your ego, but it is not a hopeless situation. When it comes to design, you need to make sure that your site’s pages are as user-friendly as possible. This means that navigation should be simple, your most important content should be at the forefront, and the design should be readable. If your website design doesn’t meet these criteria, it might be time to go back for a redesign.

Reason #3: Internal site links don’t work (broken)

There are many situations where you need to move your site from one host to another and/or upgrade your site engine. The transfer process is not very complicated, as you might imagine. However, this can lead to some technical problems, one of which is that the internal links of the site stop working.

If you’re using the same domain after the migration, you don’t need to replace your internal links. However, these links may still not work for some other technical reasons, such as:

• Possible problems with the caching module

• There may be problems setting up the file.htaccess

If you are using the caching module (plugin) on a recently migrated site, try disabling it. After that, check if your internal links are working. If so, your website traffic should gradually increase.

However, if the issue persists, you can proceed to verify the .htaccess. Basically, your new host may not set up a file for you .htaccess, which can cause conflicts if you’re using a custom permalink structure.

Double-check the settings of this important file, for this you can use a sheet for the .htaccess file.

Keep in mind that it may take some time for traffic to recover to previous levels, so don’t panic if you don’t see improvements in one day!

Reason #4: Used keywords on pages are no longer effective for

If you care about search engine optimization (SEO), you probably use effective keywords for all your articles. The problem is that trends change and even the best keywords can lose their popularity. For example, an article written for a keyword in today’s trend can bring great results in the near future. However, as soon as this trend goes down, you can lose most of this traffic.

In most cases, the drop in website traffic will not be as sudden if it is related to the keywords used. It is, however, a gradual process. And in order to figure out if your traffic is dropping due to the fact that your keywords are losing their popularity, you have to work a little.

For most sites that experience this problem, the main problem is that they don’t post content as often as they should. If you want your site to stay relevant, you must keep posting new content and constantly monitor the performance of your keywords.

More importantly, you need to research the keywords you use for your content. Ideally, you should aim for those queries that will continue to bring traffic even years after the articles were written. This, combined with a steady stream of high-quality content, will increase your chances of avoiding a sudden drop in website traffic.

Brief Summary of SEO

It is important to remember that traffic to your site can and will fluctuate. In some cases, you will see an organic reduction in traffic. However, site traffic issues can indicate underlying problems with your site, especially if they happen all of a sudden.

Based on practical experience, there are four most common reasons for a drop in website traffic:

• Your website is slow

• You have just redesigned your website

• Your internal links are broken (broken)

• Used keywords have lost their effectiveness

That’s all for today. If you have any questions or comments about the topic of this article, feel free to use the comments section below.