We redesigned our website, make it responsive and page views tanked. What happened?

[Anna72]

Last year, we redesigned our site and made it responsive. Our page views only grew by only 3% (the previous year they grew by 40%). If we exclude homepage views from our calculations, we get a drastically different picture-- and see over 30% growth for both total and unique pageviews. Any thoughts?

[dohertyjf]

Hi Anna!

Did you do any other site architecture or design changes to your homepage? Sounds like overall your site is performing better (though not as quickly as the year before) with the changes but your homepage had something changed that would have affected this.

That, or if they are unique visitors then you may have lost some key rankings or a key traffic referral source. Or, quite simply, this isn't connected with the redesign and your marketing was less effective in the past year possibly because your resources internally were going towards the redesign.

Have you dug deeper into different traffic and referral sources to see if this could have led to it?

[Anna72]

Hi John, Yes, we redesigned homepage (it used to be a fixed width with a carousel). Now it's a full width hero scrolling page. We have increased our social media sources but those links mostly led to internal pages (we rarely lead people to the homepage). I'd try and dig more into the referral sources.....

[dohertyjf]

One outstanding question for me is if you see fewer pages/visit when someone lands on your homepage than when they land on a deeper page? Is your brand big enough to be able to track branded searches/visits?

[Anna72]

Yes, if we remove the homepage, the other pages are doing quite well (and increase of 30%). What would branded searches/visits show? I don't think we are quite big enough.....

[brettmandoes]

The first thing I think of is that you're measuring pageviews instead of sessions. If you put a lot of effort into streamlining the user experience, wouldn't you expect a decrease in pageviews as users are finding what they need faster?

I would check a few different things to gain a more complete picture. First, check your sessions instead of pageviews. If sessions are trending the way you expect them to compared to the previous year, then maybe the redesign impacted user behavior so they're hitting less pages on the site.

Next I'd see if there was any differentiation between mobile, tablet, and desktop pageviews that are skewing the data. Since the site is now responsive I wouldn't be surprised to see a difference in user behavior on mobile devices, and that may be impacting your pageviews.

Lastly, why not segment and compare by traffic source? If you can identify a sharp drop from a particular source you might be able to gain some insight there. An easy method of viewing this is to create a collection of pie charts or bar graphs so anyone can quickly see where the change was.

There are other ways you can slice and dice and segment your data to tell your story, but I would start there.