Sudden Drops In Website Traffic and How to Fix Them

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Regardless of the quality of your site, it is necessary to update it regularly to keep tabs on the multiple algorithm changes that happen every year as well as changes in consumer internet use. If you recently redesigned your e-commerce site and experienced a drop in traffic, here are three possible plausible causes.

Redirects

Redirects are necessary unless you didn’t change the URLs during a site redesign. They tell the search engines where the new version of each page is located. If you are not sure that you fixed the redirects correctly, just log into Google Search Console, then Crawl>Crawl Errors and choose the “Not Found” tab which will show pages without redirects. To fix this problem, you only need to implement 301 redirects for each of the old pages, and your traffic levels will be back in a few weeks.

Site Structure

Your web development team needs to create a new sitemap if you drastically changed the site structure during the redesign. You can present your new sitemap to Search Console in order to fasten the re-indexing of your webpages and restore the traffic levels. You also need to update the internal links to match the new URLs.

Site copy

If the redesign included the creation of an entirely new copy, it is essential that the copywriter includes the keywords that you initially ranked for. Failure to do so will lower your traffic as your e-commerce Singapore site won’t rank on search results.

How to avoid traffic drops when redesigning

Integrate SEO

Ensure that the web design team regularly consults an SEO expert during the redesign. SEO strategists advise on changes that will improve your traffic levels, which is worthwhile for your e-commerce Singapore website.

Crawl the existing site and plan the new site architecture

Before making changes, you should take an inventory of every page on your site using the many free online tools available. Most of them present the results in a spreadsheet that is downloadable. This will ensure that all your valuable information is accommodated in the redesigned version.

Create 301 redirects

You should make sure that each URL is set up as a 301 permanent redirect to tell Google that the page has permanently been moved to another location.

Make a new sitemap

Before launching your site, you should make a new sitemap that includes the critical pages on your site and should not exceed 100 pages.

Traffic drops after site redesigns are stressful and very common. Ensure that your analytics tracking code is in place to avoid traffic loss.

About the Author

Tom Koh

Tom is the CEO and Principal Consultant of MediaOne, a leading digital marketing agency. He has consulted for MNCs like Canon, Maybank, Capitaland, SingTel, ST Engineering, WWF, Cambridge University, as well as Government organisations like Enterprise Singapore, Ministry of Law, National Galleries, NTUC, e2i, SingHealth. His articles are published and referenced in CNA, Straits Times, MoneyFM, Financial Times, Yahoo! Finance, Hubspot, Zendesk, CIO Advisor.

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