What to do if your traffic drops sharply
LightSEO · Technical SEO
What to do if your traffic drops sharply
The first rule: stay calm and avoid changing everything at once. Every drop has a cause, and in most cases you can see it in the data – gut feeling will not show it.
Sequence
How to find the cause
1
Check that it is really traffic that dropped
Sometimes the traffic is fine and only the tracking dropped: the counter broke or someone changed the code on the site.
2
See exactly what sagged
The whole site or individual pages? One category or all of them? This narrows down the possible causes right away.
3
Check the technical condition
Site availability, indexing, errors in Search Console, server response time.
4
Compare with the dates
What happened just before: a site update, a structure change, a migration, an algorithm update.
Causes
The most common explanations
A technical failure. The site was blocked from indexing, redirects broke, the server went down. This is the most common cause of sharp drops.
Changes on the site. A redesign or a restructuring without redirects.
An algorithm update. In this case the whole site sinks gradually – a single page dropping overnight points to something else.
Seasonality. Compare with the same period last year instead of the previous month.
Competitors. Someone built better pages for your search queries – the rankings show it.
Key points
What not to do
Do not change everything at once. If you make five fixes together, you will never know which one helped.
Do not rewrite your texts in a panic. Start with a technical check – in most cases it gives you the answer.
Traffic dropped and you don't know why?
We will run a diagnostic and find the cause using Search Console and analytics data.
