With only five days till Christmas we are now at the stage when most PPC campaigns involving some sort of post option for gifts will start to hit the day when it is no longer possible for the gift to get to people before Christmas. For website owners, the last few weeks or so they would have been noticing a general decline in their traffic, which I have seen with a few of my websites too. Should bloggers be worried about this decline in traffic? On the surface, absolutely no! It is a natural thing to occur around this time of year.
The main reason traffic drops around this time of year is simply because less people are online. Instead of being at work, student doing assignments and so on, everyone is generally away from internet-enabled devices, enjoying the Christmas holiday break. For some, this will even involve going away on holiday too.
Take two of my websites below. You can clearly see that traffic has been on a surge for one and the other is consistently getting traffic. However, in the last week or so, things have started to drop for both:
The stats from one of my websites shows lower peaks for the weekend and, for yesterday (Monday 19th December), a decrease in pageviews as compared to the last few weeks.
With this WordPress hosted website, Â you can see the traffic is on the increase week after week. Yes, I did make a change to the design of the website which encouraged web users to visit more pages per visit from 28th November onwards. However, you can clearly see, based on this data, that the traffic should at least match the week before. But, if you look at the pageviews and visits per day, you can see it is very low compared to the week before, suggesting it will not achieve the traffic the week before achieved.
But, am I worried? Course not!
If I was new to blogging, I definitely would be worried at this point since this seems to be very unusual, especially since all the hard work you may have put into a website will be for nothing, you might think, if the traffic keeps decreasing. But, there is going to be a point when it picks up again (which I have found to be early January, when everything goes back to normal after New Year’s Day).
This brings around the good point that at different times of the year, you may find that the traffic of your website decreases/increases. On the whole, this is generally because of something external to your website which is causing an increase in interest or a decrease in interest for the content on your website. For example, one of my websites for school revision material always gets a huge peak around May/June time – the time of year when millions of students study and revise for upcoming exams that are planning to take.
