Even with the best design and content, websites can experience a decline in traffic, leading to decreased visibility and ultimately, reduced revenue. It is a frustrating experience when your website is not getting the amount of traffic you know it deserves.
Using online analytics tools like Google Analytics 4 can help you explore and identify possible reasons for losing website traffic. The data you can get can help you place your attention on the root cause of the problem and implement fixes to improve your website’s performance.
If your website is not delivering the desired results, there could be several reasons. And here are some of the most common factors for losing website traffic:
1. Poor Content Quality
Content quality should be a priority when it comes to attracting and retaining visitors. Poorly written or irrelevant content won’t engage users, so make sure that whatever you post on your website provides valuable information to readers and resonates with them. Also, consider optimising your content with keywords to maximise organic search engine visibility and draw more visitors to your site.
2. Broken Links
It is vital to know how many links are on your website. All the more, you must know the number of broken links. Customers who click on a broken link will see a 404 Page Error, which leads to frustration and disappointment. To avoid this, ensure to check your website for broken links regularly. Nonetheless, you can quickly fix broken links. Otherwise, you will see a decrease in your web traffic stats.
3. Lack of Promotion
If you want people to visit your website, you need to get the word out about it. There are numerous ways to market your websites, such as blogging, social media marketing, and email campaigns. You should also look into leveraging other external websites by building relationships with related sites to get more external links back to yours. Doing so will help boost visibility and drive more web traffic in the long run.
4. Slow Page Load Time
Nobody likes waiting for a page to load. A slow page load time can significantly reduce visits because if it takes too long to show up, people will leave and go to other websites instead. Optimise images and video files, use a good caching plugin, and upgrade hosting plans to increase page speed.
5. Inadequate Internal Links
Internal linking helps visitors navigate a website while reducing bounce rate, the percentage of visitors who leave after viewing only one page. Additionally, internal linking increases page views per visitor as they click through various posts or pages related to what they are currently reading about on your site. Consider having around three internal links per post related to relevant topics within your website. It may encourage readers to stay longer on each webpage they read before clicking away from it quickly because of a lack of interest.
6. Unfriendly Mobile Design
In today’s world, almost everyone accesses websites using their mobile devices. If your website is not optimised for these platforms, you are losing out on potential web traffic over time. As users continue accessing websites using their handheld devices at an increased rate daily, you have to keep up. And physical computer hardware usage becomes less relevant these days unless coding or design work is being done.
It might be beneficial to build a dedicated mobile version of your website. Also, consider switching to a responsive design platform, like WordPress. It allows multiple customers’ viewport sizes to be served simultaneously upon requesting any URLs found within the URL bar.
7. Outdated Plugins and Themes
Plugins and themes allow complete customization of websites. Still, they must be updated at all times to prevent any serious issues from arising due to possible security vulnerabilities existing upon older versions. Outdated plugins and themes can result in a loss in online presence or trustworthiness among previously returning customers upon seeing dated errors displayed across your website. Even though you have excellent product offerings, visitors will leave your site if your website plugins or themes are outdated.
Takeaway
Seeing your website losing traffic is disheartening. These things mentioned above are the major reasons you experience a decrease in your traffic stats. Fortunately, you can usually fix them, so be sure to check your website frequently for any errors. In addition, investigate each avenue and create a recovery plan to prevent a sudden decline in traffic.