It is normal to experience your website going offline; your traffic has a sudden drop, and you do not know the reason behind it. Most content marketers, owners, and professionals experience this. Following a lot of marketing blogs and checking them from time to time can help you to be up to date with the current trends.

There are a lot of potential reasons behind a sudden website traffic drop. Often, the new Google Algorithm is the first thing that pops into the webmasters' mind when finding a reason why.

Of course, you cannot blame it all on Google. On this post, we’ll give you five different reasons why your site is losing traffic or experiencing sudden drops on website visitors:

Recent Website changes

Other than having an update from your website host, look if there are any recent changes in your website. Web design is always the culprit for these changes, but search engines do not easily find most of them. You can also look at your website analytics. If you are a beginner in website analytics, you can check "how to" guides across the internet that will guide you around the analytics.
Due to website redesigns, your website traffic may experience sudden drops because Google will check on the new website design and if all content is in place. It should also go back to its normal website traffic rate within a few weeks. If there are still problems with your traffic rate, you should use Google Analytics when checking your website insights and look for suspicious data from your traffic sources.

Many times, website redesigns can cause traffic drops because the website went into maintenance mode or offline mode. This is why SEO’s don’t advice downtimes when changing something in the website.
Lastly, check for the search engine results pages and monitor these regularly. If you are using the Google search console, you will most likely see these things:
  • Google messages
  • Internal and external pages that are connected from your site
  • Site errors
  • Site crawl rate
  • Keywords that are connected to your site in search engine sites
These data will easily give you basic diagnostics to know more about your current situation, especially when coming from the changes to your site.

Changes in Google Algorithm




Google always changes its algorithm at least once a day. Some reports would say that they change the algorithm up to 600 times a year. Most of those updates are only minor changes, but there are three major updates on Google.
1. Google Panda Update. It is a search filter that is made to stop sites that have low-quality content from going up the search engine results page. They will need to work on their content to go back in ranking higher in the Google’s search results pages.

What triggers Panda?

  • Thin content
  • Duplicate content
  • Low-quality content
  • Trustworthiness
  • Content farming
  • Quality of User-generated content
  • High ad-to-content ratio
  • Low-quality content surrounding affiliate links
  • Websites blocked by users
  • Content mismatching search query

2. Google Penguin Update. It is aimed to decrease the rankings of various websites that violate the Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. In other words, it lowers the rankings of sites that spam their way to the top of the search engine results page.

What triggers Penguin?

  • Acquisition or Purchase of backlinks
  • Links coming from low-quality spammy websites
  • Keyword stuffing

3. Google Hummingbird Update. This update in algorithm focuses on the precision of giving good results from the whole query, instead of word-per-word search. The main goal is to find suitable results from the whole search input, rather than matching a few words.

Check your Competitors

It is important that you investigate your competitors regularly. There will be times where your competitors will bump into you, and eventually, this may cause you to lose a lot of spots in your ranking from different competitors you have.

It is important to start looking at their techniques and strategies in soaring high in the search engine results rankings. Then you should start incorporating their techniques to yours and build improved and fresh SEO tactics to fight your way to the top or you can hire affordable SEO services if you're unsure of what you're doing. This way you won't be dabbing into something you're not familiar and to lessen the probability of downfall of your website.
Besides their websites, also look at their social media sites. You can use different tools that gather impact on both websites and social media pages. For websites, organic keywords rank-tracking tools are handy, especially if you need information about updates in your search engine such as current ranking, positioning, changes in ranking within a certain time, etc.

For social media sites, you can access their influence, keywords, engagement with people, and user experience. It is important to take a close look at your competitors to be ready for any drop in your website traffic.

Potential Hacked Website




After looking if your site is running and the analytics are working just fine, it might be possible that your site is hacked by a certain individual or by an external site. No one is safe from having their website hacked. Hacked websites are effects of having poor website security; it will be easier for hackers and malware to infiltrate them.

Hacked websites can be easily tracked with the help of Google search console, often webmasters will get malware infection messages from the GSC and tips on how to solve them.
You would want to contact your web developer immediately in helping you get your website again. After this, you should consider upgrading the security of your site.

Quality of Content you’re Producing

"Content is king" - Having poor content that is up on your site will significantly affect your website traffic, which means that it is very important to ensure the quality and standard of the content you are posting.

Aim always for the best and exemplary kinds of content for your sites that are also aimed at your target audiences. Lastly, this will immediately give you higher rankings in the search engine results page.
Pro-Tip: It’s advisable to use quality and copyright-free stock photos to your post to better visualize on how you’re portraying your content.

As a starting business it is not uncommon for website traffic to drop randomly. To address them immediately, you should regularly monitor your website. If it turns out that your traffic drops because your website suffers from these negative signs, try not to panic as it will be a waste of time. Approach the calmly and hopefully, with these you won’t ever face a website traffic drop again.