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 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.
6 Common Technical Causes Of Traffic Drops
So you identified that your traffic dropped. But why?
Beyond simple issues like low-quality content or algorithm updates, there may be a host of technical reasons for why your traffic plummeted.
There are too many possible reasons to name, so here’s a list of some common technical causes.
1. Site Migrations
Site migrations are a main reason behind sudden traffic drops due to factors like improper redirects, sitemap 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 rely 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.
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, here are 10 ways to get your website get indexed faster.
4. Faceted Navigation Problems
Speaking of variants, another common cause of traffic drops are from 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 tutorials, read articles, 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: 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 for sudden traffic drops and poor visibility in SERPs—no matter your SEO skills.
Because crawlers have varying capabilities when it comes to JavaScript execution, you can experience partial and inconsistent indexing across search engines, potentially missing your crucial pages.
An easy fix to reclaim your JavaScript site’s lost traffic and prevent drops in the future? A dynamic rendering platform like Prerender.io.
How Pre-Built Rendering Helps Prevent Traffic Loss
A pre-built rendering platform like Prerender 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.
Improved Crawl Budget
Prerender renders your JavaScript pages in advance. So when bots request to crawl your pages, we feed them the HTML version of your JavaScript pages. Here’s what your dashboard looks like within a short period of integration.
The process saves you plenty of additional crawl budget that can be allocated to other high-priority web pages.
Faster Indexation
Because of crawl budget optimization, Prerender also helps your content get 100% indexed in days. This makes it an ideal solution for dynamic product catalogs or pages with frequent updates.
Curious what this content looks like in SERPs? Don’t worry—Prerender distinguishes between bot and human traffic. The platform serves bots the lightweight HTML version that’s cached and fully rendered, while showing users your full content in search results.
Structured Data Enhancement
Prerender guarantees that crawlers see the same structured data as users, helping to eliminate discrepancies between client-side and server-side content. 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 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.
Although Prerender serves pages to bots, users can now experience the content much quicker. Therefore, this improves your site’s speed while positively impacting your user’s experience.
Improved Core Web Vitals (CWV)
Prerender 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 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
Why Prerender?
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 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 if Prerender is right for you:
Curious to see if this is the solution to get your site’s traffic back on track? Get started with 1000 free renders today.
