If your website has seen a decrease in traffic lately, you’re not alone. Some of the biggest websites in the world have been getting less traffic lately. A trend like that would be hard enough to beat, but when one or more of these sites are the major search engines Google, Yahoo and Bing, that’s a combination that’s nearly impossible to overcome. After all, those search engines can drive significant traffic to your website. If they have fewer visitors, you’ll almost certainly have fewer referrals from them and thus less website traffic overall.
Reasons why
The reasons for the decrease in website traffic are numerous and complex, but one major reason that is consistent with other observable and knowable trends is that people are moving from desktop to mobile. This has been true for a few years now, but PC purchases have only recently begun to decline instead of just lagging behind tablets and smartphones. Tablets topped the growth chart with a big 50+% increase in shipments in 2013 and we’re seeing this trend reflected in our client Google Analytics accounts.
With tablets and smartphones, users have several apps to choose from, and a web browser is only one (or two) of them. It makes sense that with the increased number of options/apps being presented to consumers there would be a decline in web browser use. There hasn’t been an increase in the number of hours in a day, and reasonable people won’t be spending more time with their eyes on their devices as they acquire more apps. They will divide their attention to make room for the new, and the web browser in anything but new.
What to do
Don’t worry too much about the decrease in traffic. Worry about taking advantage of the traffic you have. Spend more time controlling the user experience on your own website to effectively convert passive visitors into engaged users.
photo via flickr:
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