Website design chnage and massive traffic drop?

[techdna1]

I changed my Drupal theme to "Bootstrap 3" and now my traffic is down 50% gradually in past 5 days, can this be theme related?

Answers to checks below :

1). There were no redirects involved, I just flipped a switch and changed theme for my Drupal blog.

2). No issues reported by Google WMT except the fact that impressions fell, see stat images for comparison at - http://imgur.com/a/5PssH#0.

3). site:mysiteurl.com shows healthy "About 201,000 results".

4). Checked slow loading times and browser issue, nothing there.

5). It's not a seasonal drop.

Pls. suggest what else should I focus upon to find the reason. @Prateek_Chandra where can I share my analytic report with you privately. I can also enable guest access to my account for you to have a look.

[Prateek_Chandra]

Hi , I am sorry for the late response. For some reason I did not get any notifications for your message. Please check my private message to you.

[Keith-Eneix]

Oh Crap! I hate those moments. : ) I've been there.

Here's some questions you can ask yourself to get you on the right track to fixing your problem:

1. Did you change your site from noindex/nofollow to index/follow? - I know this is pretty basic but I see it happen all the time during dev work.
2. URL structure change - when you switched over to a new site did you use the exact URL structure that your previous site had?
3. 301 redirects - following the previous question, if URL structure did change, you'll need to 301 redirect all URL's properly. On this note, the authority of your 301 redirects will not fully pass over to your new URL's for about a month (if you're doing good social promotion you won't really notice a difference).
4. Proper use of the canonical tag - You'll want to make sure your site is using proper attribution with the rel canonical tag (if you're using canonicals). More then likely this is not the problem you're dealing with unless you have a large eCommerce site or multiple category blog with potential duplicate content issues.
5. Indexing issues - if you have a ton of 404 pages you're also going to experience some indexing issues (this would be part of the URL structure change). Plus, if those 404 pages were quite authoritative, you probably lost a lot of ranking juice as well. Load times - if you're new site is loading really slow this will also cause indexing issues. Google's picky, the only time they crawl really slow sites is if they have significant authority.

Aside from those tips, I'd really need to see the site and do an analysis for you.

Valuable resources for you: 
http://moz.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects http://moz.com/blog/restructuring-your-website-and-how-to-minimize-traffic-loss

[Prateek_Chandra]

Hi,

Sorry to hear that you are in the situation but its a problem many website owners face when they change / upgrade the website.

You have mentioned that your website traffic is down by 50% gradually in past 5 days. While there could be many reasons for the same but there are some basic checks you should do:

1. Ensure that all the indexed links in the old website are either live on the new site or redirected (301) to their corresponding pages on the new site.

2. Ensure from google webmaster tools that your new site is not facing any indexing problems. You can also do a quick check to see what pages are indexed. (Use "site:www.yoursite.com" in google search or check webmaster tools.)

3. Ensure that there are no technical issues like, slow site loading time, browser compatibility issues etc. Sometimes some scripts on your new site may affect the website loading times significantly so much that on many occasions the site fails to load.

4. Verify from google analytics if your website traffic has dropped or the avg time , bounce rate etc have changed. There is a high chance that your website's average visit duration would have dropped or bounce rate would have increased which would affect your site's conversions significantly.

If the above things are in place we can get into some advanced analysis:

1. Check your google analytics report and compare same time frame for last month or year to ensure this is not a seasonal slow down of traffic for your industry in general.

2. Check google analytics to find out if your traffic sources (organic keywords, referrals etc) are showing some abnormality compared to your website's average weekly report. You would need to compare this over few intervals of time to be able to point out any significant variations. If there are huge variations, specially in organic sources and referral sources, chances are its an impact of google's recent updates which would have affected your website's rankings.

If you still don't find a solution, please share with me your google analytics report for last 6 months.

I am hoping my answers could be of some help to you but in case these are things you have already checked, I will be glad to assist you further.

Regards,

Prateek