What I learned from a drop in visits to my website
Over the last three days of October, I noticed something unusual on my outdoor website: a sudden drop in the daily visits. Normally, it averages around 500-600 visitors per day, but it had plummeted to 100 or less.
It was so odd that I contacted the Squarespace help desk to check whether there were any issues. Nope they said, and assured me everything was working as normal.
Why my website visitor numbers may have dropped
I racked my brain and came up with a couple of potential reasons:
increasing attention on the US elections meaning lower visits to my own website
a recent alert from Google Search Console that a newly published blog post had three broken links
I couldn't do much about the first, but ran my website through a free broken link checker to fix the second.
At the same time, I decided to look through older blog posts on the site. I noticed some content - like Christmas gift ideas in 2018 - was no longer relevant, so started removing outdated posts. That meant running a few more broken link checks just to make sure I'd not created any new issues.
When I'd finished, I resubmitted my site map to Google Search Console, asking them to recrawl my site.
Bizarrely, a week or so later, I noticed the analytics figures for the end of October were different again, back to normal levels. I contacted the Squarespace help desk and, lo and behold, their engineers had identified an issue that they were fixing.
While all this may just have been a glitch, the experience reminded me of a few important things that I think are worth sharing with you.
Four essential tips to improve your web content and user experience
1. Make sure your links work
I made the mistake of publishing a post with several external links without checking whether they all worked. My Dad telling me “do as I say, not as I do” springs to mind at this point!
Read #6 on my blog post 8 things you must check before hitting publish on your blog posts
Broken links signal to Google that a website is poorly managed and/or of low quality, which can harm your search ranking.
What you can do about it:
Always check links before publishing! Also run your website through a free broken link checker every month to find and fix any that aren't working.
2. Update or remove outdated content
If your web content is outdated, it can negatively affect your ranking and authority. Google may even mark it as spam.
Importantly, it’s also a poor user experience, and can reflect badly on your brand - and that’s not great for attracting customers.
Instead of removing outdated posts, sometimes you can refresh the content to make it relevant again. Updating older posts with current information or new insights can be useful for SEO and readers. For example, you could add new statistics, update examples, or include recent case studies. You can also create a new title and headings, and link to more recent related posts on your website.
What you can do about it:
Review your blog posts regularly and see if you can refresh older, high-performing posts with current information. If something’s no longer relevant and not worth updating, remove it altogether. Using a 301 redirect can help keep your search ranking for that page.
3. Track analytics to understand what’s normal
I get it, analytics can be confusing - yep, I’m looking at you Google GA4.
Different platforms often report data differently too, so it’s difficult to compare the figures. For example, Google Analytics doesn’t match my Squarespace Analytics because they count and class things in different ways.
Honestly, I have no idea which is correct but I’m not worrying about it. The important thing for me is looking for trends instead of exact figures.
When you make improvements, it’s also important to track their impact over time. Great metrics to watch out for are organic traffic growth (via Google Search Console or Analytics), bounce rate, and session duration.
What you can do about it:
Pick one analytics tool and review it monthly using a checklist. Look for upward or downward trends to understand what content works well. Over time, you’ll see whether improvements are making an impact.
4. Focus on human-first content
It’s easy to get caught up in analytics and SEO. I keep a regular check on the analytics but realised that in the process of worrying about broken links and drops in traffic, I was missing the single most important thing:
Creating genuinely helpful and useful content for your reader (in other words, human-first content).
What you can do about it:
Think about the reader first whenever you create new content. Put Google search and SEO to one side for now, and focus on useful, interesting, and relevant content. Keep content up to date, and always write from the reader’s perspective - not just Google’s.
By focusing on these four key things - broken links, updating content, tracking and measuring, and human-first content - you’ll help improve your website’s performance and create a better experience for visitors.
Get in touch if you’d like to chat about your web content.
Read more writing and blogging posts:
How Google’s helpful content guidelines can improve your blog