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Moved to a better host, improved site speed significantly and....a traffic drop. WTF.

by a0adio0
15 replies
Last month, my site brought in over 104,000 visits and 300,000 page views. So this month, I switched hosts from a premium GoDaddy account to a Cloud-based SiteGround account (the $80/mo. option - should be much nicer and faster) and paid WPFaster to get my site speed way up.

My assumption was that this would result in a traffic increase.

The strange thing is that my traffic actually dropped by about 300 to 500 visits a day after all these improvements.

Is that typical? Do I just need to give all this more time?

I know that in this business "results may vary" is almost always applicable, and Google doesn't do much of anything fast these days, but it seems weird to me that my traffic would drop after these changes.

Let me know what your thoughts are. Any help would be appreciated.

Sincerely,
Bobby
#anda #drop #host #improved #moved #significantly #site #speed #traffic #wtf
  • Profile picture of the author Brent Stangel
    My assumption was that this would result in a traffic increase.
    How does changing host increase traffic?
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  • Profile picture of the author Mehdib
    Changing host my result in traffic increase if only Google values the dramatically improved speed of your website. It works like this, you change to a better host, you use CDN if possible to increase website load time, then Google sees that as improvement and that helps your site to rank better on search, but it does not automatically happen.
    A drop in numbers could be many things, from technical issues and downtime of the site to simply not having correct .htaccess on the new host.

    What I suspect is that, you had a downtime while transferring the site, Google or other search engines crawled then and saw nothing then dropped the value of the site. This is more common than you think, after many many years in this business I have seen this many times.

    Just to be safe, test your site with testmysit with Google ot Gtmatrix and see what is going on.
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    Marketing dude in technology world
    Works as digital marketing manager at ID printers

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    • Profile picture of the author a0adio0
      What is "testmysit"? And do you mean GTMetrix? Are you just talking about testing site speed?
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      • Profile picture of the author Mehdib
        "testmysite with Google" search this, and sorry I am writing in a hurry at the office.
        Yes something like GTmetrix shows if there is latency in server response time. If all that is alright and you are still not recovering the traffic then there are other underlying issues.

        Also changes to A records, DNS records or IP addresses on domain (to point to new server) can take up to 4 days to propagate all over internet and this means some bots, or even people won't see your site for a while
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        Marketing dude in technology world
        Works as digital marketing manager at ID printers

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  • Profile picture of the author faisalmaximus
    Sometimes changing hosting server affects the ranking of a site, you just keep continuing your traffic generation process and within a few days everything should work nicely. Btw, how you are generating so much traffic everyday ?
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    • Profile picture of the author a0adio0
      Ok, yeah that's what I figured. It didn't strike me as a big deal, but did seem kinda odd considering I was improving on the current framework.

      I've been running my site (guitarchalk.com) for almost five years now, and have been growing pretty steadily, especially after 2015 when I moved to Wordpress on the Genesis framework.

      It would take me awhile to explain everything, but you can checkout the content here: https://www.guitarchalk.com/blog

      I've got a 9 to 5 but this is my most productive venture, and it's not close.
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  • Profile picture of the author ChrisBa
    How long has it been since you've switched? Could everyone's dns not have been updated yet?
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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    Originally Posted by a0adio0 View Post

    Last month, my site brought in over 104,000 visits and 300,000 page views. So this month, I switched hosts from a premium GoDaddy account to a Cloud-based SiteGround account (the $80/mo. option - should be much nicer and faster) and paid WPFaster to get my site speed way up.

    My assumption was that this would result in a traffic increase.


    How does that make sense?

    Traffic would first have to land on your page before they made a decision whether the page was slow or fast.
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  • Profile picture of the author Alex A2Hosting
    Where does your traffic mostly come from? Is the drop from 1 particular source?

    For example, if the majority of your traffic comes from search engines and you've noticed a large drop from search traffic, then that should point you in a closer direction (checking if you've dropped in results etc).
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    Alex - alex@a2hosting.com
    A2Hosting - Our speed, your success.

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  • Profile picture of the author Jesus Perez
    Bobby, those might not be actual visitors being lost. They might be bots.

    Siteground has ModSecurity rules in place to block certain attacks that GoDaddy might not have had in place.

    https://www.siteground.com/kb/how_do...ct_my_website/

    Maybe look through the old logs and new ones to verify they're actual real visitors you've lost?
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    • Profile picture of the author a0adio0
      That's interesting, because while traffic and clicks have gone down, my sales (mostly Amazon associates) have stayed the same or even increased on certain days.

      Seems to me like you might be onto something.

      I've noticed my rankings in Google drop slightly, though not enough to seem like anything more than statistical noise.

      I'll do a little more digging, but I suspect you're correct.
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  • Profile picture of the author Jesus Perez
    One more thing. Has your site been around for at least 1 year? If so, compare last year's traffic and look for a trend. Right now we're personally seeing drops in traffic related to Spring break and it happens every year like clockwork.

    If you haven't been around 1 year, check Google Trends for your keyword. Your audience might be on the road right now.
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    • Profile picture of the author a0adio0
      Yeah we've been around for almost 5 years, and I've definitely seen similar trends whenever things warm up. March and April have always been super-unpredictable.

      Here's where I've noticed a "dip" every March/April:



      So anyways, I guess that's the answer. I was just worried initially that there were some technical issues, but that's clearly not the case.

      Thanks for your help, Jesus.
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