For companies that have an online presence or conduct businesses online, traffic is considered the lifeblood of their website. The more visitors you have, the more chances of getting noticed and making your brand known. Furthermore, traffic allows a website to build relationships and ultimately encourage people to purchase their products or services. This is why a drop of traffic can be a terrifying prospect as it indicates possible losses and lower revenue.

There are multiple reasons why a well-performing website loses its promising surge of traffic. It could be technical, algorithm-related or slack in optimization.

To help you determine why your website is losing its traffic, here are some possible reasons behind it.

Newly Updated Website

Upgrading websites are a common thing. After all, you need to have a professional-looking and user-friendly website to entice more people to visit your page. However, if you just recently tweaked your site, you can expect that your traffic will go down. If you have recently changed some of your codes, page layout, URLs, content, images, and metadata, without a doubt you will inadvertently remove your indexed pages in Google.

Server Overload

Once you notice that you are losing traffic, the very first step is to check your web servers. It is common that some websites are not able to keep up with the demand from people trying to visit the website. Therefore, it is critical that you check your server and find out if you need to switch to a different plan. That way, your website will be ready for traffic spikes, avoid downtime and resolve the drop in traffic.

Change in Domain Name

Many startups go through different transitions, and this includes rebranding or changing their domain name. Once you change your domain name, you will lose a lot of traffic. Typically, changing it can lead to 404 error or 500 error, which means, you will need to set up permanent redirects for each of the URL in your website to recover the traffic.

Traffic Geolocation

If you are not experiencing any redirect errors, then you can consider the geolocation of your traffic. For example, you changed your domain from .uk to .com - going global means you will now be as relevant to the searches from UK. But the advantage here is that you can potentially gain traffic from other countries other than the UK.

Going from HTTP to HTTPS

Adding the "S" here signals your visitors that you are a secured website, and that your company values the information you receive from your visitors. Because of this, many websites are moving from HTTP to HTTPS. But one of the consequences, when you transition from HTTP to HTTPS, is that you can potentially lose some of your traffic. You can fix this by using temporary 302 redirects instead of 301 redirects.

Not Mobile Friendly

Everywhere we look, every person we see seems to have a smartphone. This automatically tells you that as long as they have an internet connection, they will use their phones to access different websites. When your site is not optimized for mobile use, you will lose your visitors. Sites that are mobile friendly are easily accessible, loads fast and buttons are clickable.

Algorithm Update

Google continues to change its algorithm. In fact, the people behind this company never stop doing it. Once they release an update, there is a huge chance that websites can get affected by the change. Normally, there is nothing to worry about as your traffic will eventually come back to normal. But if you have been adopting unscrupulous optimization methods, then there is a huge chance that you can get hit from this and never recover.

There are still other reasons that could cause your traffic to drop fast. To prevent these problems, always plan ahead and think long term. It is easier and more cost-efficient when you plan ahead of time and postpone any website action rather than implementing many different things and fix the damage later on.