Website Drops Some Traffic after Redesign. What's Happening?

[Thriveworks-Counseling]

What it is NOT:

• No Link was broken. I have used Moz, Screaming Frog, Excel, etc - there are not broken links.
• We have not added spammy links.
• We kept the same amount of links and content on the homepage - with an exception of 1 or 2.
• All the pages remained canonical. Our blog uses rel=prev rel=next, and each page is canonicalized to itself.
• We do not index duplicated content. Our tags are content="noindex,follow"
• We are using the Genesis Framework (we were not before.)
• Load time is quicker - we now have a dedicated server.
• Webmaster tools has not reported any crawl report problems.

What we did that should have improved our rankings and traffic:

• Implemented schema.org
• Responsive design
• Our bounce rate is down - Average visit length is up.

Any ideas?

[customerparadigm.com]

Eli -

I took a look at the site, as well as a view of the site through the Wayback Machine.  If you did keep all of the links intact on the site, then there are two possibilities:

1. Your traffic is down by 20% because of the redesign to a responsive WordPress theme or some other factor that caused Google to dislike your site.  Usually Google likes responsive themes, but perhaps something changed in ranking due to other competitors in the space?

It could also be due to seasonal traffic fluctuations.  Can you measure the traffic not from month-to-month, but from year-to-year?  Perhaps counseling and life coaching interest is strong as kids go back to school each year in September (people might want a fresh start), but wanes as the challenges of life grind on with homework, job stuff, etc?

2. Your traffic is really the same as before (and not down 20%), but the way in which the traffic is gathered has changed, due to the responsive theme on your WordPress site.  The site tracking code for the new version of the site might be positioned in a different part of the page, and, due to the responsive design layout, might not be working like it did before.  The javascript calls might be happening well after the site "responds" using other javascript.

If you still have a way to view the older version of the site, a waterfall test that shows how everything is called from the page might be a way to eliminate this second possibility.

Hope this helps…
-- Jeff

Are overall conversions down

[DougRoberts]

Even if you get everything right when undertaking a re-design, you can't get away from the fact that some things have changed and your search performance is likely to impacted. It can take weeks or months for the site to regain the lost traffic. From the analytics screenshot, it looks like you've done a pretty good job.

As Jeff mentioned, you do need to take into account seasonal traffic fluctuation as well as any other external activity. One site I manage has experienced a significant change in traffic since the end of British Summer Time. Can you compare you traffic with the same period last year.

Can you see any similar fluctuation when you look at Google Trends for some of your keywords?

Have your rankings changed? What keywords and what was the landing page for each keyword. How has the landing page changed in the re-design.

The problem with aggregate/average analytics metrics is that they don't provide you with much of an insight into what's happening.

Can you segment your non-paid search traffic, and your direct traffic and see if both segments are affected in a similar way. If your non-search traffic is also affected then it might suggest an external factor.

Take a look at your landing pages for your search traffic and compare them to the previous higher traffic period. Are all pages similarly affected or are there significant differences on particular pages. If there are you can compare the content of these pages to the previous incarnation of the site and see if you can explain why there might have been a drop.

Of course, I'm assuming that the main goal of the re-design wasn't to "get more visitors", but to get more leads or sales. You say that the bounce rate is much lower and the time on site is better. What about conversions?

Again, segment your non-paid search traffic and compare the number of conversions and the conversion rate before and after the update. It's perfectly possible to have less traffic and improve your conversions if the traffic is more relevant and with the right commercial intent.

Hope this help.