Why is Your Website Losing Traffic? 10 Common Issues + Fixes
Is your website losing visitors, and you’re not sure why? Here are some of the most likely reasons and how to address them.
Traffic dips are frustrating, especially when they affect your conversions and overall business growth.
Most professional service firms get the majority of their traffic from search engines. So, if your site starts to slip in rankings, it can have a significant impact on your business demand.
However, losing traffic isn’t always purely related to SEO. As we’ve seen with many brands that we’ve worked with, things like brand updates and user experience optimisation play a big role in how much traffic you generate.
Whether it’s a technical issue, a brand issue, a search engine algorithm issue, or more, there are many factors that can cause a drop in traffic. Identifying these issues early is crucial to turning things around.
After all, quality traffic means lead generation and business growth for any modern business. So, if you’re losing out on traffic, you’re also losing out on revenue.
To help you get your site back on track, let’s explore the most common reasons websites lose traffic. We’ll also offer some actionable tips to fix them.
Whether it’s a technical glitch, outdated content, or competition overtaking you, here’s what you need to know.
Slow Hosting
Your hosting solution has a direct impact on how fast your website loads.
Slow page loading times cause serious frustration, leading visitors to abandon your site before they even engage with your content.
In fact, if your website takes more than three seconds to load, you can expect to lose about 50% of your traffic.
Search engines also factor in site speed when ranking pages, meaning slow hosting can negatively affect your search rankings.
So, if your hosting plan doesn’t match the needs of your website, you’ll lose out on both traffic and search visibility.
To solve this, you need to be using a hosting solution that is suitable for the size and demands of your website. Options like dedicated or cloud-based hosting provide better performance compared to shared hosting, especially for websites with heavy traffic.
Far too many businesses build their initial website on a low-end hosting platform and don’t upgrade their hosting as their website expands and business demand grows. Make sure that you build your site on a quality hosting foundation, as this plays an enormous role in your website’s overall technical performance.
Slow Performance
Beyond hosting, your site can still be slow due to things like inefficient code, unoptimised plugins, or oversized images.
These issues can make your pages load slowly, which negatively impacts user experience and rankings.
Both users and search engines penalise slow websites, so even the best content won’t matter if your site’s performance is sluggish.
Make sure your site is optimised for speed. This includes compressing images, minimising code, and regularly updating plugins to improve load times.
Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights are useful for measuring your site’s performance and identifying areas for improvement. However, you’ll need to do a deep dive and full technical audit for proper optimisation.
Performance issues happen to all sites over time. As you add new content, pages, and plugins, these small elements start to bog down your website. This is why an ongoing, proactive approach to site optimisation is essential.
Loss of Relevance
Content is the backbone of a successful website. But, as there’s so much great content out there, being constantly updated, your content’s relevance can fade over time.
If your content no longer addresses the needs of your audience, you’ll quickly see a decline in engagement.
Users expect fresh, up-to-date information that solves their problems or answers their questions. Failing to keep your content relevant will cause your traffic to drop.
Regularly audit your content to ensure it remains valuable and aligned with current trends. Update old posts, add new insights, and remove content that is no longer useful.
It’s also essential to keep up to date with your competitors and target market. Understand how your brand is positioned and how relevant your digital experience is. Things are always changing, and you need to keep up if your business is going to stay on top.
A dynamic content strategy that evolves with your audience will help maintain traffic and engagement levels.
Algorithm Updates
Search engines, particularly Google, constantly update their algorithms to improve the quality of search results.
Google updates its algorithm around 500 to 600 times a year. Are you staying on top of this?
Even minor changes can affect your rankings, meaning that a dip in traffic could result from an update that prioritises different ranking factors.
To stay ahead of these changes, you need a proactive SEO strategy. This includes keeping track of major algorithm updates, regularly refreshing your SEO tactics, and ensuring your website meets the latest best practices.
Use tools like Google Search Console to monitor your rankings and detect drops early.
Most importantly, you need to know when major updates take place and what they involve. If you simply leave your website as it is when these updates take place, you’ll almost certainly lose traffic over time.
Not Responding to Ranking Losses
It’s easy to lose visibility if you don’t actively monitor and maintain your rankings.
If you see a sudden drop in traffic, it could be due to losing positions in the search results. Whatever the reason for this may be, you’ve got to identify and respond to these losses if you’re going to fix them.
Otherwise, the snowball effect can lead to a major decrease in visitors if you don’t react quickly. The longer you wait to address the issue, the harder it becomes to recover.
Use analytics tools to track your rankings and identify which pages are losing visibility. Then, adjust your SEO strategy to recover these losses.
Update the affected content, refine your keywords, and ensure your technical SEO is in order.
Again, this is why it’s so important to have a consistent approach to monitoring and optimising your website.
Technical Issues
Even the best content won’t rank if your site has technical issues that prevent search engines from indexing your pages correctly.
Technical SEO problems such as broken links, crawl errors, and improper redirects can all contribute to a drop in traffic.
This is a major topic, but some of the most common technical issues include:
- XML Sitemap Changes: If your sitemap is not structured properly, search engines may have trouble crawling and indexing your pages, which will hurt your rankings.
- Redirects: Misconfigured redirects can confuse search engines, leading them to skip or misinterpret pages on your site.
- Crawl Errors: If Google can’t crawl your site, your content won’t show up in search results. This is often caused by issues like broken links or incorrect use of robots.txt.
Regularly audit your site to ensure there are no technical barriers stopping search engines from crawling and indexing your pages. Various SEO monitoring tools can help you identify and fix these problems.
Although, technical SEO is a big and complex topic. If you don’t want to miss anything, then make sure you work with technical SEO experts monitoring your site’s health.
Falling Behind Competitors
Your competitors are updating their content and SEO strategies all the time. If you’re not doing the same, they will inevitably overtake you in the rankings.
The online world is highly competitive, and falling behind means losing valuable traffic to competitors who offer fresher, better-optimised content.
To stay ahead, conduct regular competitor analysis. Check how your competitors are ranking for key search terms, review their content strategies, and identify areas where you can improve.
Keep an eye on changes in their SEO and ensure that your site remains competitive.
Manual Penalties
Google can manually penalise websites that violate its guidelines. If you’ve engaged in questionable SEO practices, such as keyword stuffing or buying backlinks, your site could be hit with a manual penalty.
These penalties significantly impact your rankings, and in many cases, sites are unaware they’ve been penalised until they notice a sharp drop in traffic.
If you suspect your site has been penalised, check Google Search Console for any notifications and take immediate steps to fix the issues.
Disavow bad backlinks, clean up your on-page SEO, and ensure your website complies with Google’s guidelines. Once you’ve made the necessary changes, you can request a reconsideration to lift the penalty.
What’s most important here is to only work with reputable SEO professionals who only use white hat tactics. There are no shortcuts when it comes to SEO. Investing in quality SEO services is always going to take your site further than trying to do things fast and cheap.
Cannibalisation and SERP Layout Changes
There are several subtle reasons why your traffic could be dropping in search results, including issues related to how search engines display your content.
Two common problems include keyword cannibalisation and search engine results page (SERP) layout changes.
- Cannibalisation: If you have multiple pages targeting the same keyword, they could end up competing with each other. This dilutes the overall effectiveness of your SEO and could cause you to lose rankings. It’s important to consolidate similar content to avoid cannibalisation. Having a clear SEO content strategy from the start is also crucial.
- SERP Layout Changes: Google regularly updates how search results are displayed. New SERP features such as featured snippets, local packs, and knowledge graphs can push your site further down the results page, reducing your visibility.
Monitor how your pages appear in search results and adjust your strategy accordingly. You may need to restructure your content to ensure that each page targets unique keywords.
Staying on top of SERP layout changes will help you maintain your organic visibility.
SEO Problems or Brand Problems?
When analysing traffic loss, it’s also important to determine whether the root cause is an SEO issue or a brand issue. Both can have similar symptoms, but the solutions are different.
SEO Problems
If your site’s visibility, rankings, or traffic have dropped suddenly, the cause is likely a technical SEO issue, algorithm update, or ranking loss.
In this case, optimising your site structure, improving content, and addressing any technical SEO problems should be your focus.
Brand Problems
A gradual decline in engagement could point to a brand problem. Outdated messaging, poor user experience, or a lack of relevance in your market could be turning visitors away.
Your brand’s voice and value proposition must resonate with your audience, and your website should reflect that.
Conduct a comprehensive analysis to identify the true cause of your traffic drop and address the issues accordingly.
Traffic vs Conversions
Finally, it’s important to remember that traffic is just the beginning of the customer journey.
More traffic doesn’t necessarily mean more sales. You need to understand how to turn that traffic into revenue.
Focus on offering a seamless digital experience, where users can easily find what they’re looking for and are encouraged to take the next step, whether that’s signing up for a newsletter, downloading a resource, or making a purchase.
To increase conversions, test different elements on your site, such as calls to action, landing page layouts, and navigation structures. This process, known as A/B testing, can help you refine your website and maximise the value of the traffic you’re already receiving.
You’ll also want to review your website’s user experience (UX) and identify areas where visitors might be dropping off. Tools like heat maps can help pinpoint problematic areas.
Make sure your website is not only designed to attract traffic but also optimised to convert that traffic into tangible results.
The Bottom Line
Your website is your most valuable online asset. It’s where you generate leads, gather interest in your business, and convert visitors into customers. To achieve all this though, you need to generate traffic first.
Remember that gaining website traffic is an ongoing process. The digital world is always changing, and competition is only getting tougher. Your site may have been performing well a year ago, but that doesn’t mean you’ll continue to see the same performance levels without ongoing optimisation.
Websites lose traffic all the time. While this isn’t always a major issue, it’s essential that you’re proactive about monitoring your traffic, understanding where it’s being lost, and knowing how to fix it.
At Itineris, we don’t only develop websites, but we also work with sites on an ongoing basis to keep them up to date. From SEO and brand strategy to technical optimisations, we’ll ensure your site stays healthy and competitive. Get in touch if you need to fix your website’s traffic problem.