When I changes Template, why traffic goes down?

[hammadrafique]

I've noticed that when I change my blog's template the traffic goes down dramatically, about of 40% decrease. I know that new themes can have some problems but I have tried this with 2 different themes. First try was with genesis framework(Paid one) and just in one day traffic went down and when I reverted the old theme, the traffic became normal.

Should I wait for 1 week to see what happens?

What could be the potential reason of this?

[MoosaHemani]

Hammad if is normal for the traffic to drop when you made any significant change on the bog and changing the entire theme can be one of them. I have worked with different clients and in my understanding the drop can be controlled to minimum if you have a shift plan, time and you should have a clear idea that the theme you are uploading didn’t have any problem.

I believe you should be ready for it if you are changing the theme all you need is a perfect planning to make that traffic drop to minimum.

Hope this helps!

[hammadrafique]

But What should be the plan for changing the theme? I'm not a dev, nor a designer and only use premium Wordpress themes for my blog.

[kayintveen_MD]

If you are really carefull on links, content and theme quality the drop with be temporary. But complete structure change with different headings, changed internal link structure can really do harm on your site for a bit longer.

As long as gross kept the same only the theme changes, and you don't build of a lot of 404's you'll be fine within 1 or 2 weeks.

[evolvingSEO]

I'd try to get really specific on two things;

• "traffic" - are you saying only Google traffic? All traffic?

• if it IS google traffic, did you notice if Google has actually crawled and re-cached the new version on the website?

• also, does traffic decrease evenly across all pages on the site? or is it limited to just certain pages or sections?

• "changing themes" - are these theme changes only design / skin changes - or do they affect URLs, internal links, content (such as page titles/descriptions etc)

I think answering these questions really matters in terms of figuring out what happened. I think it's very unlikely for just a surface skin/design change to hurt traffic so much - there must be deeper things going on, and it's just a matter of figuring out what the specifics are.