5 Reasons For Your Website Traffic Drop and How To Reverse It

Article Contributed by Jean Turner

Website traffic is the backbone of every website whether it is a simple blog, a highly professional business website or an online store. In absence of sufficient traffic, a website is meaningless. Thus, it is the prime aim of every website owner to attract more and more traffic to the site.

Search engines like Google use many factors to figure out what to show their search results. Your website needs to be in compliance with these guidelines in order to be competitive. There are as many as 200 factors that help determine who shows up on top of search engine results. (Source: Google’s 200 Ranking Factors via Backlinko)

Dropping web traffic can be terrifying. The inability of people to find your website can easily result in loss of earnings and business.

There may be different reasons why the traffic to your website is declining. In this post, we will investigate some of these key reasons and discuss what you can do to improve it.

#1 Poor Website Performance

The website loading speed is the first thing that a visitor finds on a website, if it’s faster enough to impress a visitor, more traffic may be driven. But, a slow-loading website will cause dropping of website traffic. People simply hate slow-loading websites, thus, a person in hurry will skip your site if it takes too much time to load and won’t visit again.

There are many factors that may be behind the website slowdown. However, you can consider the recent changes you have made in your site to figure out the cause of the problem. Some of the causes include:

• Recently installed one or more plugins.
• Renovation of your site or switching to another theme.
• Problems from the end of your hosting provider.

To fix this problem, first, measure up the loading time of your site and if it’s not satisfying then work on it to resolve it in any way you can. Once you bring the loading time under control, then use your favorite analytics tool to track your site’s performance. If the traffic stops dropping then the problem was with site performance if not try the next method.

#2 Latest Google Algorithm Update

Google has implemented several algorithm changes to improve the quality of searches. The company always try to find out ways to enhance end results for users, thus, you should make an effort to comply with such changes. If you have missed an important change implemented by Google in its search technology, you will surely be hit by this improvement.

Moreover to figure out whether your website has been penalized by a Google, simply check the traffic of your website to find out the exact date when the traffic dropped significantly. After this, you will want to check whether that drop correlates with a change in the algorithm by the giant search engine, Google.

#3 Ineffective SEO & Low-Quality Content

SEO is an important aspect of managing websites, with this technique, you can keep your website’s ranking up, resulting in more visitors to your site. Keyword research is of utmost importance in search engine optimization techniques so as to build powerful pages that can rank on the search engine. You need to target well-researched keywords to get better results.

Apart from this, the quality of content, frequency of posting articles, and interaction with your visitors can also affect your site’s traffic. Make sure that you post quality articles without too many keywords and unnecessary content, publish fresh articles on a regular basis, interact with your visitors by replying on their comments, feedback when required.

#4 Low Quality or No Backlinks

The internet abounds in different link directories from which many are considered as spam. If there is an unnatural link from your website, Google will consider that you sell links to third-parties. You should clear links on your site that seem to be paid or add a nofollow to such links. Try using quality directories such as Yahoo! Directory.

#5 Confusing Navigation and Poor User Experience

If your website is poorly designed and is confusing for users to navigate it can increase the bounce rate resulting ia n drop in traffic. Page navigation is as important for an effective website as its performance and other elements. There should be a simple way for users to easily go from one page to another. Sitemap is one of the ways which allow your visitors to easily get to a specific page. Design the whole site so that navigation between different pages is easy and intuitive.

Conclusion

If you want to attract huge traffic to your website and sustain it, then this is a time-consuming task and can be frustrating at times. But, instead of losing heart on dropping traffic, you should look for the root cause of the problem and resolve it accordingly to sustain your passion or business. Above reasons are some options that may help you overcome this problem.

Author Bio: Jean Turner is a WordPress expert and passionate for creating unique and customizable WP themes. Being associated with theem’on, a premium WordPress themes development company, she has also explored the writing skills, thereby delivering a lot of detailed WordPress based posts.