Traffic dropping? How to determine the cause and fix it

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It’s Monday morning and you open up yourGoogle Analytics stats. Then there it is, something you don’t wish to see at the beginning of the week: a sudden drop in traffic. And not just a small decline in traffic, no this is a significant drop. Panic strikes, time for action! First, take a couple of deep breaths and grab a piece of (digital) paper and write down the things you should check. This post will help you to identify what the problem is, and how to fix it.
Before you start panicking, check the data

Before you start investigating the cause, it's a good idea to check if there really has been a drop in traffic. It's possible that you're not seeing the right data, due to IT problems or changes in your analytics setup. This is especially true if there's a large and sudden change.
Does the date range make sense?

After you’ve taken your deep breath, check how ‘bad’ the traffic drop is. Sometimes a drop can look sharp because you’ve set the wrong date range. For example, you’ve included today and the day isn’t over. Or you’re looking at an hourly report, or a date range including a weekend when traffic often dips a bit.

It's important to remember you can get skewed graphs because of the date range you’ve chosen. No website hasa consistent amount of traffic; it goes up and down. It’s key that youput the drop into perspective. Take a broader date range that you can divide by seven, or compare date ranges. One of the things worth exploring is to compare the date range with last year's date range. Did you have a similar drop in % last year? Then perhaps the dip in traffic is a normal seasonal fluctuation.
Finding the cause of your traffic drop

Now you’ve established that there is a significant traffic drop and it’s not caused by a technical error or an unlucky chosen date range, it’s time to look further.
1. Check your channels

First, you need to check if you’re getting less traffic from one or more of your main traffic sources. The acquisitiontab inGoogle Analytics gives more insight into what drives people to your website. Have a look at the Channels you’ve got and plot rows of each channel. You can plot six channels at a time:

It’ll show you a specified graph with a graph line for each channel you’ve plotted. That way you can identify which channel caused the drop. Once identified, you can specify even further by clicking on the Channel or by narrowing down the Source and Medium of that Channel in the Source/Medium tab.
If you see a decline in organic traffic,you might have an SEO issueon your hands, like a Google Penalty. If so, sprint to your Google Search Console account to check if you’ve got amessage from Google. Also, if you see less traffic coming from social media channels, check whether you’re still active on these channels. A decline in Direct traffic could indicate things like a new competitor showing up, or some pages don’t work anymore.
2. Is it an SEO problem, or something else?

If your organic search traffic is dropping, then it's likely an issue with your SEO is causing it. We'll come back to SEO and ranking problems in a moment.
Aside from organic search traffic, something might’ve gone wrong on your social media, or maybe your newsletter wound up in everyone’s spam folder. If your direct traffic has dropped, take a firm look atyour site’s health. Do you have a propersite structureand is it user-friendly? Are you providing the bestuser experience? Do you meet your visitor’s expectations? Do your pages work and is yoursite fast enough? Make sure you're giving users a reason to remember your site and come back again.
Be aware the reason your traffic is dropping might be entirely out of your control. For example, if your traffic has dropped in a specific region it could be due to public holidays, hurricanes, power outages, an unstable political climate, and so on. By looking at your countries data in Google Analytics, you can identify if a specific country has a significant drop in traffic. Then you can check the news and find out if something has happened in that country.
3. Traffic drops due to SEO problems

When you’ve gone through these steps to check your site’s SEO, and find that your traffic has dropped, you obviously want to know why. It could berelated to your ranking. But this is a bit harder to check, unfortunately.
You can use the Wincher rank tracking integration in Yoast SEO to see how your most important pages are performing. But bear in mind, you won't be able to see how your rankings have changed immediately after setting it up, as earlier data hasn't been collected.


Tracking keywords and monitoring your pages’ positions in search isn’t all that easy.Google AnalyticsandSearch Consoleshow some information about search positions and the queries your pages are being found for, but it’s not provided in a way that’s easy-to-use. Rank trackers can make this easier, but if you haven't set one up already then you'll need to do it the long way.