So you’ve decorated your house for a party, laid the table with delicious dishes, hired a live band...but no guests have come. Oh, no! The same thing can happen to your website, making you wonder — where are the visitors? Low website traffic is a big problem. Let’s see what makes people ignore your site and what you can do to improve the situation.
Reasons Why Website Traffic is Down
1. Outdated information
When was the last time you updated the information on your site? Have you done it at all? If you don’t remember, it is not surprising that your website is trailing behind. Everyone likes fresh information. This includes both people and the search engines that rank your site in search results.
2. Bad UX (user experience)
A successful website is created for users from the start. Why is Google successful? Because it is based on users’ needs. If users like the product, the company will make a profit. If you stick to best practices for UX (user experience design), you can make your website convenient for people. The more shortcoming that can be identified and corrected, the more the problem of low website traffic can be fixed.
The most inconvenient things for website users:
- Pages taking too long to load;
- No phone numbers or support addresses;
- Music or videos start automatically;
- Countless pop-ups.
Having no call to action in the writing also affects the p site and lead to low website traffic. If everything is written too simply, i.e. "two times two is four" and the like, the user will leave quickly without getting interested at all.
3. No mobile optimization
All serious companies have long since optimized their websites for smartphones, tablets and other gadgets as people have been using them more and more for navigating the web. A website that displays perfectly on a desktop may still have a bad layout on a mobile device. Users may have to do a lot of scrolling, the text may be hard to read, the links may be hard to click, and the necessary information may be hard to find. That’s when users leave the site, never to return.
4. No search engine optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization works effectively. But if you want your site to be found really quickly, contact the specialists, so they can do everything right and add the most up-to-date information to your site. It’s not just about picking the right keywords. Promoting a site includes many aspects. Promote your site on social networks and advertise your product.
5. Strange URLs
It hurts a site when its URL consists of too many characters. It may be not very important for most people, because they are primarily interested in the site itself. But complicated addresses may cause devices to slow down when opening them and sometimes even make the user restart the browser.
6. Broken links
“Error 404: Page Not Found” can be a real nightmare. A link should guide the users to the page where they want to get. Most visitors close the page and go to other places if they encounter an error. The most patient ones will click back and continue to browse the site, but these users are rare. Besides, it’s good to find everything one needs on one site.
7. Ignoring statistics
Statistical analysis is really important. Services like Google Analytics can provide all the information on website traffic or the effectiveness of each page separately. Using this data, you can fix problems to make the site better, or find a new approach to old problems.
Making your site easy to navigate for users and fixing the problem of low website traffic can be a challenging task. So if you need help in that, you are always welcome to contact our website development company.