45% drop after changing theme on large news site - why??

[Kingdingle22]

Hi all,

I purchased a large news website (5k pages, 1k linking domains all naturally accrued) about 4 months ago.

I had the theme customised so the site looks sharper.

Since I have put the new theme on it has coincided with some significant drops in traffic:

-46% organic
-26% direct
-50% referrals

I put the new theme live the last day of January so the traffic drop is comparing Jan to Feb.

No updates of note during this time except Panda 22 Jan which isn't coinciding. Also this site is 6 years old and never been affected by one.

The fact that the organic drop has coincided with a drop in the other two is noticeable.

I can't figure out what could be causing this? Perhaps because there were more internal links on the side bar to 'top stories' etc?

I am thinking of switching back to the old theme and seeing what happens.

Would massively appreciate any thoughts.

 

[ITsoldUK]

Could be any number of things and would require more insight that can be offered on a forum me thinks.

However, that said, one question springs to mind re your organic drop.

You changed the theme but did you change the structure of the site? Nav, CMS, URLs etc.

 

[Kingdingle22]

No changes to UTLs or CMS (WP) but the side bar changed which would have about 40 links to popular stories

 

[Websitehandyman]

Do you have details of indexed pages now compared to just before you changed ? totals, top pages ?

Have you removed content that was linked to ?

Can you trust the last personal figures ? what was the top refering site then and what is it now ?

As it's a news site is the content as fresh as it was before, is it being passed out to social media ? is the rss feed the same as before ?

Just a few things to concider.

 

[OldWelshGuy]

If you moved stuff around then that could impact on your SEO which will of course impact on traffic. Much direct traffic is as a result of second visit, and the same with referral traffic.

have you altered the way the site runs at all? You mention it is WP was it posting regularly but that has slowed/stopped for instance?

I would go to WMT and look at what it is saying about traffic rankings etc.

 

[Kingdingle22]

Thanks all for the comments.


@ James - Will have a mine through GWT and see what comes up.


I've yet to find any potential causes to be honest.

- No loss of links
- Posting remained consistent
- Google News feed still active
- Hard to say regarding rankings as everything was longtail so not really monitored except for one head KW on the homepage that is the same.

I am thinking, at least, I can always revert back to the old theme and see what happens.

 

[Kingdingle22]

News is definitely the biggest loss on referrals...

 

[terryuk]

Have you looked at how seasonal traffic was prior to purchase, I would imagine news sites have spikes with popular stories etc.

Were there always ads on the site? or is this new?

Did the web host change?

 

[Kingdingle22]

I actually removed the adsense when changing the theme.

Hosting has remained the same.

 

[JonathanSEO]

I own a news site that lost a bit of traffic in February too.

Obviously the month is 10% shorter so that explains some of it but I found it quite tough to diagnose anything else. I just figure they may have changed the way they rank news articles that favours larger publishers even more than usual.

I haven't had chance to look into it fully though as the site doesn't really rely heavily on news traffic but I will try do some digging.