Field Guide › Why did my website traffic drop?

Why did my website traffic drop?

Most likely, fewer people are clicking, not fewer people needing you. Search engines and chatbots now answer many questions on the spot, so the visit never happens. Ordinary causes exist too: a redesign that broke pages, a slow site, a busier competitor, or the season. The test is whether your calls fell as much as your visits did.

Where did the visits go?

For a lot of businesses, nothing was lost. The searching still happened. The clicking stopped.

Someone types your kind of question into Google and gets a written answer at the top of the page. Or they ask ChatGPT and get a straight recommendation. Either way they have what they came for, and they never open anyone's website. This is now most of what happens on Google: a 2024 study by SparkToro found that 58.5% of Google searches in the United States ended without a click to any website.

So a falling line on your visits chart can mean the same number of customers, reached a different way. It can also mean something else entirely. The next section tells you which.

How do I tell if I actually lost business?

One question sorts it out. Did your inquiries fall as much as your visits did?

Pull two numbers for the same stretch of weeks, this year against last year:

• Visits to your website.
• Inquiries — phone calls, form submissions, emails, booked jobs. Whatever you actually count as a lead.

Then read the result:

• Visits down a lot, inquiries flat. You're being answered without being visited. Annoying to watch, but your business is fine. What matters now is whether your name is in those answers.
• Both down, by roughly the same amount. Something real broke or someone is beating you. Work through the ordinary causes below.
• Visits down, inquiries down harder. The people who do arrive aren't calling. That points at your website itself or at your pricing, not at search.
• Visits down, inquiries up. Fewer, better visitors. Leave it alone.

What are the ordinary reasons traffic falls?

Don't skip these. They're the ones you can fix this month.

1. A redesign changed your page addresses. The single most common cause. New site, new links, and every old link into your site now goes nowhere. Click through your own site from a search result and see what happens.
2. Your site got slow. Open it on your phone on cell service, not office wifi. If you count to four before it appears, people are leaving before it loads.
3. A competitor is doing more than you. Search your business and your town. If someone new is above you and has pages answering the questions customers actually ask, they earned it.
4. It's the season. Furnace people are quiet in June. Movers are quiet in January. Compare to the same month last year, never to last month.
5. The counting changed. A new website, a cookie banner, or a swapped tracking tool can make your numbers drop when nothing about your business did.

If nobody is clicking, what am I supposed to do?

Stop chasing visits and start chasing being named.

When a customer asks Google or ChatGPT for a plumber in your town, the reply lists a couple of businesses. It's a short list. Being on it is worth more than a hundred visitors who were only browsing. Being off it means you were never considered, and you never even see the miss.

Getting named comes down to two plain things. Your own pages have to say clearly what you do, where you work, and answer the questions you get on the phone all day. And other places on the internet — reviews, directories, roundups, local mentions — have to back that up, because these tools lean heavily on what other people say about you.

That work doesn't usually bring your visits chart back up. It brings the calls.

Have us find out why