Reasons Why Your Website Traffic Dwindled Down (Part 2)

What could be the other factors that would affect website traffic? The last time, I talked about the growing number of mobile users and the change in the way users search for information.

For this blog post, I will continue to discuss issues such as having an unsecured website, indexing concerns, and hacking.

1. Indexing Issues

• Let us talking about indexing issues first. What does this mean? It could be that Google could not search for your website and its continents.
  • Google shouldn’t be blamed for this because it simply means that you have surpassed your ongoing web host subscription. When this happens, your website exhausted its allocated resources and it will display error 404 or Page Not Found. It could altogether stop displaying web pages.
  • In this situation, the web host or the server cannot show your web pages. You can equate it to having too many web browsers opened on 1 computer. The computer starts to slow down as the RAM slowly gets occupied by the browsers, and eventually, it wouldn’t be able to show web pages.
  • Another factor is that… as your website grows over time, more bots websites will crawl your website aside from Google. These rogue bots will compete with Google’s bots.
  • Whatever the situation is, whether it’s the host or the bots, both situation is not good for your website. There are ways to lessen the negative effects of rogue bots. You can use firewalls like Sucuri , WordFence, and web security apps. These programs can block these rogue bots off your website. Another alternative you can do is to subscribe to a better and sturdier web host.
• Remember that there are moments that the web host will purposely suppress the web traffic. This is to maintain the resources for all the other websites on the same server. So, don’t be surprised when there are instances that the host stops displaying your web pages.

2. Unsecured Website

• The web browsers have advanced features unlike before. It has the ability to warn users when they are about to access the uncertain website. It’s likely possible that your potential web visitors are getting a warning message from their browsers.

3. Hacking

• Web traffic could also be affected by hacking. This could be unauthorized web pages and links that you did NOT create. An easy way to test if your website has been compromised to use an FTP program to check the website. I have listed down a list of FTP programs here.
• Another method to check your website is to go to the indexing section of the Google Search Console. Browse through the indexed pages and search if there are pages that you and your team have not made.

4. An Update in Google’s Algorithm

• Lastly, it could be just Google. The team behind Google is constantly changing how things work. The new update could have just rewired the existing configurations. Google is relentless in finding dubious web activities. With a set of new rules, you need to adapt to these algorithm changes.