What should you do if your website is losing traffic?

February 25, 2026 Joe Fisher

First of all, don't be like this guy. DON'T PANIC (I bet that doesn't help much right?). But seriously, it won't bring the traffic back. Whether it's an ecommerce, service or SaaS website - stay caaaalm.

Three Key Questions

Is it normal? It depends but generally traffic fluctuation does happen for most websites.

Is it fixable? Yes. The recovery time depends on numerous factors though.

What's the fastest way to know it's serious? If leads/sales are dropping from your website and it's hitting the bottom line (more on this below).

Just to introduce myself and show you I actually know what I'm doing - I'm Joe Fisher, an experienced SEO consultant who has been in the game for over a decade. I've worked on hundreds of websites to increase traffic and recover traffic losses.

Check out my case studies page for more details.

Anyway, enough of me, here I've written a few key actionable pointers in what to do if your website is losing traffic.

Steps to recover website traffic

STEP 1) CHECK YOUR WEBSITE IS ACTUALLY LOSING TRAFFIC IN GA4

STEP 2) CHECK WHICH CHANNELS ARE LOSING TRAFFIC IN GA4

STEP 3) CHECK WHICH PAGES/URLS ARE LOSING TRAFFIC IN GA4

STEP 4) CHECK WHICH URLS AND CHANNELS COMBINED ARE LOSING TRAFFIC IN GA4 SIMULTANEOUSLY

STEP 5) IMPLEMENT WEBSITE RECOVERY ACTIONS WITH SPECIFIC CHANNELS

STEP 6) IMPLEMENT WEBSITE RECOVERY ACTIONS WITH SPECIFIC PAGES

STEP 7) WAIT AND ASSESS THE IMPACT THE ACTIONS HAVE HAD ON WEBSITE TRAFFIC

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Essentially, before anything you need to contextualise the traffic loss. Which channel is losing the most/least? Which pages are losing the most/least? Is it seasonal? Is it user demand? Is it a competitor growing? Was there an algorithm update?

CONTEXTUAL POINTS

CHANNEL - Is it the paid channel losing traffic and you've reduced ad spend?

PAGE - Is it an irrelevant blog post that you don't actually want traffic to anymore?

SEASONALITY - Has traffic decreased vs the previous month and you sell jewellery at Christmas?

USER DEMAND - Has general demand dropped for your product/service?

COMPETITOR - Is there a new competitor with a ton of organic resource? You'd need to check the SERPs and a third party tool for this

ALGORITHM UPDATE - Has Google updated its algorithm and has your site received a penalty?

STEP 1) CHECK YOUR WEBSITE IS ACTUALLY LOSING TRAFFIC IN GA4

By traffic loss here, I'm referring to sessions in GA4 - this is the clearest, simplest metric when it comes to website traffic. Not clicks in Search Console and certainly not impressions. Not some third party tool like Ahrefs/SEMrush (sorry guys) - but raw data from Google Analytics.

Make sure your GA4 is set up correctly (consult the website dev if not)
Go to Reports
Go to Business Objectives
Go to Generate Leads
Go to Traffic Acquisition
Pick a Date Range of atleast 28 days and Compare to Previous Year (NOT PREVIOUS PERIOD)

Look for Sessions in the table - is it a percentage increase or decrease? If it's an increase (green arrow) you may have been looking at traffic compared to the previous period - it may be demand or seasonality - check google trends for your service/product to substantiate this.

If it's a percentage decrease (with the red arrow) then we need to investigate further in GA4.

Let's check two elements

The default channel groups
The landing pages

STEP 2) CHECK WHICH CHANNELS ARE LOSING TRAFFIC IN GA4

On the same Traffic acquisition dashboard in GA4 you should be able to see the default channel groups.

You need to now evaluate which channels have decreased by the highest percentage/number (of course if the numbers are negligible as in 2 sessions last year to 1 - concentrate on channels with atleast 100+ sessions).

In my case the worst performing channel is referral traffic (which I'll admit I've been neglecting).

As you can see there has been a 87.5% decrease in referral traffic to my site YOY - so that's something we should delve into deeper.

I'd now click the dropdown and filter for Session source / medium. Then I'd add a filter to filter for the session default channel group - exactly matches - referral.

Now we're starting to get more context around where exactly that specific channel has lost traffic.

I know these are really small numbers but they help it make sense. 5 less referral sessions from Design Rush (great website btw) have contributed to the referral traffic loss and therefore the overall website traffic loss.

STEP 3) CHECK WHICH PAGES/URLS ARE LOSING TRAFFIC IN GA4

In the same section of GA4 - Business objectives - Generate leads - but choose Landing page this time.

Keeping the same date comparison YOY now we can see which pages in general are losing traffic.

I tend to put more weight behind the non-homepage pages here as the homepage can be completely related to branded traffic - and the homepage will suffer in general if other pages are.

Found a page here as an example in the screenshot

Very tiny traffic example but it shows which section to look at.

Export every page which is losing traffic so we've got a guide going forward.

STEP 4) CHECK WHICH URLS AND CHANNELS ARE LOSING TRAFFIC IN GA4 SIMULTANEOUSLY

So I found two examples where traffic is being lost. A blog post and the referral channel.

But how would we combine the two?

#1 Let's look for which channels that blog post is losing traffic from.

Go to the Traffic Acquisition section again. Add a filter for that specific URL with Landing Page and Query String and exact match.

Now we can see that one URL is losing the majority of its traffic from the direct channel but has gained traffic organically. So let's look to increase its direct traffic first.

#2 Let's look for which pages that referral channel is losing traffic from.

Go to Landing pages - add a filter for exact match for the specific channel (session default channel group) - in this case referral. To go even more granular we can filter by source / medium and then the specific designrush.com referral traffic.

Here I can see the homepage is the one losing traffic from design rush / referral.

STEP 5) IMPLEMENT WEBSITE ACTIONS FOR SPECIFIC CHANNELS

Now you need to make changes to recover the traffic - depending on time and resource you can put into this and the vertical the website is in - it can vary on recovery times.

Here are a few bullet points on how to recover traffic from each channel

Recovering Direct Traffic

Create landing pages around your brand e.g. brand + discounts or brand + reviews or brand + faqs
Make sure your brand is consistent (name/address/logo) including the Google Business Profile
Increase non-branded traffic to increase branded traffic - focus on SEO and content marketing
Increase activity on other channels - increase email output and social campaigns

Recovering Organic Search Traffic

Crawl your site with Screaming Frog/Sitebulb and fix technical issues
Add additional relevant pages e.g. product categories/service pages/blog posts
Build links to your site via directories or outreach
Improve the UX of the site in general, mobile optimisation, faster site speed
Refresh content and make sure it follows E-E-A-T guidelines
Check Search Console for queries that have dropped and focus on those

Recovering Organic Shopping Traffic

Ensure your product feeds are optimal
Ensure all products are in stock and priced correctly
Write fresh new product descriptions which aren't copied from manufacturers
Do competitor pricing reviews and see if there's anything you can adjust

Recover Unassigned Traffic (or reduce it to improve attribution)

Clean up your tagging from email, paid social and affliate tagging
Hire a GA4 expert to look to reduce this as much as possible

Recover Organic Social Traffic

Post more relevant content for your target customers
Expand your social profiles, create bluesky and lesser known social profiles
Flesh out captions and hashtags

Recover Email Traffic

Check your email links, are these the best URLs?
Up the email volume 2x to see what impact it has
A/B test subject lines to increase opens
Use your website and social channels to increase sign ups

Recover Referral Traffic

Improve your content/website profiles by fleshing them out on the referral/affliate sites
Reach out to more trusted referral sites with relevancy
Do a competitor comparison to see which affliate/referral sites competitors are listed on

Recover Organic Video Traffic

Publish more videos around questions your users are asking
A/B test headlines to increase CTR
Make video descriptions more comprehensive with unique copy

Recover Paid Search Traffic

Optimise landing pages to be more inline with the ads
A/B test headlines to increase CTR
Regularly review keywords garnering impressions/clicks to update the negative keyword list

Recover Paid Social Traffic

Check creatives for tired content - refresh it
A/B test headlines to increase CTR
Regularly review keywords garnering impressions/clicks to update the negative keyword list
Check your paid social links, are these the best URLs?

STEP 6) IMPLEMENT WEBSITE ACTIONS FOR SPECIFIC PAGES

Now you need to make changes to recover the traffic - depending on time and resource you can put into this and the vertical the website is in - it can vary on recovery times.

Here are a few bullet points on how to recover traffic from an individual page

Submit the URL into the url inspection tool in Search Console to check its indexing
Add more relevant content to the page
Add more contextual, relevant internal links pointing towards the page
Update the meta title/description
Add to the main nav if possible
Build links to the page
Add a social post about the page
Send an email about the page
Create an ad for the page
Ask family/friends/customers to give feedback on the page

STEP 7) WAIT AND ASSESS IMPACT

Now - you need some patience - good website traffic recovery work can take time to be recognised by crawlers and indeed users. Keep checking the sessions. Keep checking the impressions, query count and clicks in search console (after my previous criticism these can be good indicators to recovery).

Website improvements do compound though - so whichever improvements you've made will benefit the whole site/brand for months/years to come.

It's a slow game, but it's worth it.

*Just a slight caveat - if you need any specific pointers, I'm happy to help out with faster recovery or better explanations.

Advice from SEO Experts I partner with

Joe Cowman - Valitas

If there are specific URLs responsible for losing traffic, I check query performance for each URL over the last 28-90 days in Google Search Console. If there are a few certain queries responsible for the drop, then I analyse the SERP to assess whether my page is fit for purpose in terms of search intent - this usually leads to competitor analysis and on-page tweaks.

If there is a widespread drop in query performance or the overall query count has dropped, then I can assume there is a quality issue; so I’ll check for any technical issues inhibiting performance and/or rebrief the content to be more aligned with the desired search intent.

Tom Johnson - Heroic Digital

If your organic traffic is declining, the first thing I look at is why.

Why is that? Is it a general CTR drop? Or has search intent shifted? That’s often the real killer. Sometimes key SERPs move from transactional to more informational results, and if your page no longer matches intent, your high converting pages might miss out on informational SERPs.

If it’s site-wide and nearly every page is losing clicks, that points more towards a broader domain issue. In that case I’d review content quality, link decay, index health, tech SEO, and overall site health.

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