We’re all too familiar with the scare of a sudden traffic drop.
And in industries where organic search drives a substantial portion of revenue, such as ecommerce, rapid traffic loss can have a stark impact on your site’s bottom line. For some brands, traffic drops can lose them millions in days.
If you’re not clear on why your organic traffic dropped in the first place, reclaiming it becomes that much more challenging. Read on to understand why your ecommerce traffic dropped, what to do about it, and an easy fix to both reclaim and gain traffic.
Why Did My Site Traffic Drop? 6 Common Technical SEO Causes
So you identified that your traffic dropped. But why?
Beyond low-quality content or algorithm updates, there may be a host of technical reasons behind why your site traffic plummeted. Speaking from experience, there are far too many to name. Here’s a list of some common ones.
1. Site Migrations
Site migrations are a main reason behind sudden organic traffic drops. In fact, you can potentially lose up to 80% of your traffic without implementing proper technical SEO protocol, says IO Digital.
The reason for this? Factors like improper redirects, sitemap issues, JavaScript rendering issues, changes in URL structure, broken internal links, and more.
Transitioning to a headless CMS, in particular, can be one to pay attention to. Headless CMS relies heavily on client-side rendering, which can be difficult for search engines to crawl and index effectively. This can also cause content preview issues, leading to suboptimal meta tags, poor structured data implementation, and, as a result, weaker visibility in SERPs.
2. Crawling Challenges
Crawling issues cannot be understated. They’re a primary reason behind why your site traffic dropped and isn’t climbing back up again. If your site can’t be crawled—and subsequently indexed—you won’t appear in search results.
To identify if poor crawling is the root cause for your traffic loss, monitor your Google Search Console, use a tool like Screaming Frog to see if your site can be easily crawled, and/or configure your robots.txt files correctly.
Not a fan of Screaming Frog? Discover ten paid and free alternatives to Screaming Frog.
3. Indexation Issues at Scale
Large, dynamic websites often struggle with index bloat, leading to critical pages falling out of the index. If your site has thousands of products, variants, and URLs, you might be one of these affected websites.
If you think that indexing problems may be the core reason behind your traffic loss, you can consider a pre-built rendering solution like Prerender.io—a particularly helpful platform if you can’t get content indexed.
Below is an example of indexing results before and after implementing Prerender.
4. Faceted Navigation Problems
Speaking of variants, another common cause of traffic drops is faceted navigation problems.
Each combination of filters for your site’s products and attributes—such as size, color, price range, and brand—can generate a unique URL. This can potentially create millions of URLs for search engines to crawl and can quickly exhaust your crawl budget, preventing important pages from being indexed.
5. Schema Markup Penalties
Correctly implementing your schema markup is crucial to mitigating traffic drops.
There are many different types of schema to optimize. But Product, ItemList, and Review schema, in particular, are a few that ecommerce businesses should focus on in order to protect your online sales and traffic.
You can follow schema markup tutorials and use well-maintained plugins to help maintain your schema, avoid long-lasting effects, and improve your site’s performance in SERPs.
6. Site Speed
Speed is another crucial factor impacting traffic loss—especially for ecommerce sites, and particularly for mobile versions.
With mobile-first indexing, slow-loading pages on mobile devices can significantly impact rankings and sales. If your mobile site performance is slower than your desktop, you may be at higher risk of traffic drops.
Curious to see how much speed can impact your mobile site’s ecommerce sales? Try our free ROI calculator to see for yourself.
Don't let site speed impact sales.
The Common Thread of Lost Traffic: JavaScript Rendering Issues
Each of these causes has one factor in common: JavaScript rendering challenges.
Most search engines struggle to read JavaScript content, while some can’t read it at all. So, if your site relies heavily on JavaScript, you are likely a prime victim of sudden traffic drops—especially if you’re in certain industries.
Because crawlers have limited capabilities in JavaScript execution, you can experience partial and inconsistent indexing. As a result, search engines may miss indexing your crucial pages or content.
So, how do you reclaim your JavaScript site’s lost traffic and prevent drops in the future? Adopt a dynamic rendering platform like Prerender.io.
How Pre-Built JS Rendering Solution Helps Prevent Traffic Loss
A pre-built JS rendering platform like Prerender.io converts your complex JavaScript pages into static HTML, an easy-to-read format for search engines. And because many of the issues above are due to JavaScript, making your content quickly readable for search engines could be just the fix you need to boost your organic traffic.
Here are some specific benefits of implementing Prerender.io.
Improved Crawl Budget
Prerender.io renders your JavaScript pages in advance. So when bots request to crawl your pages, it feeds them the HTML version of your JavaScript pages, saving your crawl budget. Take one of Prerender.io’s customers for instance. Within a short period of time, they experienced a 2.15x crawl budget increase.
The process saves you plenty of additional crawl budget that can be allocated to other high-priority web pages.
Faster Indexation
Prerender.io also helps your JavaScript content get 100% indexed in days instead of months. This makes it an ideal solution for dynamic product catalogs or pages with frequent updates.
Structured Data Enhancement
Prerender.io guarantees that crawlers see the same structured data as users. This also helps optimize your site’s appearance in rich snippets and SERPs. See the image below for how this looks before and after.
Faster PageSpeed
Prerender.io renders and caches your content for any future bot requests, therefore reducing the load on your server and improving response times. This also reduces JavaScript execution time, as the browser doesn’t need to execute as much JavaScript on initial load. This makes not only search engines happy but also your users, who can now experience blazing-fast content load times.
Top tip: Having an almost perfect PageSpeed Insights score is doable. Follow this Google PageSpeed Insights guide to learn how.
Improved Core Web Vitals (CWV)
Prerender.io can also help improve your Core Web Vitals scores, a key ranking factor for Google.
It particularly benefits two factors of your CWV: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). This is because pre-rendered pages often display their main content faster and they’re less likely to shift layout as they load.
Optimizing your CWV scores can both mitigate traffic loss and help you gain greater market share in SERPs.
Better Organic Traffic
Last but certainly not least, Prerender.io can help you reclaim lost traffic and improve your organic traffic levels, too.
For example, Dutch haircare webshop Haarshop—a 10,000+ URL website—used Prerender to improve performance for their Dutch and German sites. Below are some of their results within a year.
Haarshop’s average organic traffic spike after Prerender
Haarshop’s organic keywords performance after Prerender
How Prerender.io Can Hinder Traffic Drop
Trusted by 65,000+ businesses around the world such as Walmart, Microsoft, and Salesforce, Prerender integrates seamlessly into your workflow—no matter your JavaScript framework.
You’ll find Prerender.io helpful if:
- Your site relies heavily on JavaScript
- You have a large and frequently changing website (common with ecommerce, betting, job boards, or real estate)
- Your site is struggling with crawling and indexing challenges
- You aren’t in a position to invest in server-side rendering solution (SSR)
- You’re looking for a setup and go platform that doesn’t need ongoing maintenance
Watch the video below to see how it works:
Curious to see if this is the solution to get your site’s traffic back on track? Get started with 1000 free renders today.
FAQs
Why Is My SEO Traffic Dropping Suddenly?
Algorithm updates are a primary reason for traffic drops, but there may be underlying technical causes facilitating them. Common technical reasons include: site migrations, faceted navigation issues, schema markup penalties, and JavaScript rendering problems.
How Can I Respond To A Sudden Traffic Drop?
It depends on why your traffic dropped in the first place. If your site traffic fell because of a site migration or other technical issues, JavaScript rendering problems could be the culprit. Addressing this head on can mitigate drops in the future—especially for large websites with frequently-changing content.
