Looking For Answers to Decline

[Sparetoolparts]

Hi Guys

In June 2023 I upgraded my Magento to 2.4.5 and from then I have seen a downturn in my sales, month on month. The website has been battling bugs for months (talked about in other posts) which is still ongoing. It would be to convenient for me to blame everything on these bugs, or is it a fundamental change with Google and how they are treating my website.

So to get a bit clarity on things I want to know what reports I can run using Analytics, Google Search Console etc that can help pin point issues.

If my site outages have caused my down turn, what report would show this and what metrics will show this.

If my SEO tactics are now defunk, what would show this?

If my site speed has gone to heck what would show this?

The way I advertise my products haven't changed, My SEO On page hasn't changed (yet)

The obvious thing is comparisons before the upgrade and post upgrade, but what should I be comparing?

 

[antropy]

Magento ... battling bugs for months

Seriously, consider switching platforms.

Paul.

 

[SportsTrophyUK]

In your search console and then in the performance tab, have your impressions and clicks remained the same?

 

[Ozzy]

When I purchased this site in 2021 back from the media company I originally sold it to, within weeks of the buyback this site started dying in Google and I was banging my head against a wall.
A handful of members on here recommended speaking to AdGrow and we've worked with them since, and although it wasn't a quick fix we're back at SEO results and daily visitors exceeding levels we had before 2021 (tens of thousands a day).

So if you are looking for someone to help, and paying it forward, I'd also recommend a chat with the guys at AdGrow. No affiliation, just happy that found them through here.

 

[Paul Carmen]

If you are sparetoolparts.co.uk, your organic rankings have been on the slide since a big drop occurred in early 2022.

This means you need to look back some time to analyse the start of the problem. There are various free tools and ideas that can help:

• Google Search Console will allow you to check search terms (although this isn't as accurate or helpful as it once was and only goes back up to 18 months normally), plus page performance/indexing errors
• Google Page Speed tools and Lighthouse are free tools that will let you analyse speed issues and page improvements
• There are other good page speed tools with free access like Webpagetest
• Did the drop correspond with something major; e.g. a Google algorithm update (you can search Google for algorithm update dates and changes) or an upgrade to Magento 2
• In terms of on page SEO, there are Google schema markup tools that can help you analyse your pages for technical details, rich snippets, reviews etc that could be shown

The sheer number of products/pages you have means this is really something for an experienced SEO analyst to get involved in. It's beyond the scope of a forum.

There are also better and more accurate tools than the free ones for deeper or longer term analysis/insights, but most of these require ongoing paid subscriptions and experience to get the most of out of them.

 

[Sparetoolparts]

@antropy I would consider this moving forward, if the issues can be 100% be related to the platform and not some other variable.

 

[antropy]

@antropy I would consider this moving forward, if the issues can be 100% be related to the platform and not some other variable.

List the issues briefly below and I'll tell you if they are or not ...

Paul.

 

[Paul Carmen]

List the issues briefly below and I'll tell you if they are or not ...

I think that's the problem. The sites a bit slow, but whether that's the route cause of any issues is probably unknown at this stage; e.g. is it the cause of the ranking/traffic problems, or is that a technical SEO change, usability, or competitors doing a better job?

Analysis and a clear understanding of the issues is needed, dealing with them in order of importance, to plan a way forward.

 

[Nick@Daydot]

As of the time I'm writing this the site is broken.

It's useful to know that the organic ranking is going down.

If sales drop on a site some of the questions I'd ask are

• what's happening in my acquisition channels (search, social media etc)
• does the landing page for those channels still make sense to customer, given their search term or other intent
• are there technical issues with the site
• has the nature of customer demographics changed in some way
• are there industry-specific changes happening, or competitor activity
• from analytics has the conversion rate changed over time

OP seems to be working on some of these and suggestions have been made for others. Conversion rate is one not covered so far, and demographics can be hard to get a handle on.

 

[fisicx]

Many moons ago @Sparetoolparts asked for advice on the site and a number of recommendations were given. None of these seems to have been implemented.

The listing are still rubbish, lots of the images are still missing and many of the spare parts aren't available.

Google isn't going to bother indexing an almost empty site.

 

[Nico Albrecht]

The listing are still rubbish, lots of the images are still missing and many of the spare parts aren't available.

At least you got the site to load !!!! Apart from being slow I get on every 2nd page load server errors. Wild stuff to be honest. If you ping your site ip you may notice a lot of packages getting dropped or lost. No way Google will index that .

 

[DontAsk]

I drilled down looking for Bosch lawnmower parts. Just pages and pages and pages of exploded diagram "spare parts lists" and only one actual product, a mains lead extension that I would make myself. Maybe I can click on the diagrams. No. Then I realised you have to scroll down to see a list, select a part and it tells you it's not the part you were looking for (missing '?') LOL. Some text at the top of the screen to indicate this would help.

It's sloooowwwwww.

I can't find a geographic address in the contact us section, required by distance selling regs.

 

[Nick@Daydot]

I can't find a geographic address in the contact us section, required by distance selling regs.

That's interesting, I didn't know that. Does that apply to e.g. any website selling stuff in the UK? Does it apply to services as well? Does the address need to be a registered address? Sorry for the questions.

 

[fisicx]

That's interesting, I didn't know that. Does that apply to e.g. any website selling stuff in the UK? Does it apply to services as well? Does the address need to be a registered address? Sorry for the questions.

You are required to display an address, phone number and email address on any site offering products or services even if there is no financial component. It also helps build trust and ticks another of Google boxes.

 

[DontAsk]

A 'phone number and e-mail are not required, only a geographic address (not a PO box number).

This has to be supplied before any order is accepted, which usually means on the website, but could be on a pro-forma, or other paperwork, following an inquiry.

 

[Sparetoolparts]

Hi Guys

Thanks for the feedback and discussion

just to reply to a few of your comments

@DontAsk
My site does have the address present it appears in Privacy Policy section, the email address and phone number etc are present on all pages and my invoices and packing slips etc all contact the same details along with my VAT number etc.

@fisicx

Ref
"Many moons ago @Sparetoolparts asked for advice on the site and a number of recommendations were given. None of these seems to have been implemented."

I have been and am continuing to work on some of the recommendations made by the forum members over the years. I have limited time, resources and no in house staff to help. So everything I do takes quite a while.

Currently I'm working on the issue of the http link appearing on the product pages and how this needs to be changed to the https version. I've already updated 250,000 product and continue to work on this every few days. The inbuilt Magento update tool only allows a few thousand products to be updated a time so it is a massive project. As of yesterday I found a plugin which will allows me to update 50,100,000 products in one go, so hopefully this project can get completed soon and then I'll be able to move on

Quite a while a go I also undertook a project to move a large section of products to only appear in 1 category, this is also an ongoing project.

There are other suggestions that have been made which Yes I haven't acted on yet, but they are on my long list.

@Paul Carmen @DontAsk
The speed of the site does need addressing and is again on my list of jobs, my developers have already removed quite a large amount of bloat from it, but there is more to be done (When I can afford to carryout the work) The plan would be to buy a plugin to help with the speed I'm looking at this one:

Magento 2 Page Speed Optimization Extension | Magento Google Optimize

Magento 2 Page Speed Optimization extension ➡️ can significantly improve site performance. Install the pagespeed optimizer module now!

mirasvit.com

Any thoughts on it?

@Nico Albrecht
As part of the bug finding/fix my developers have been updating the plugins to the latest versions. Today a plugin was updated, so I think you were trying to surf while it was going on

 

[fisicx]

@Sparetoolparts - it’s the thousands of unavailable products, the missing images, the poor titles and product names and lack of descriptions that’s the problem. Unless there is something to index Google won’t be inclined to index and rank the site. This is fundamental.

Every time to start a thread it seems to be something you have added or changed and is causing problems. And of course using a poorly configured Magento site isn’t helping.

 

[antropy]

@Paul Carmen @DontAsk
The speed of the site does need addressing and is again on my list of jobs, my developers have already removed quite a large amount of bloat from it, but there is more to be done (When I can afford to carryout the work) The plan would be to buy a plugin to help with the speed I'm looking at this one:

Magento 2 Page Speed Optimization Extension | Magento Google Optimize

Magento 2 Page Speed Optimization extension ➡️ can significantly improve site performance. Install the pagespeed optimizer module now!

mirasvit.com

Any thoughts on it?

No experience of that particular plugin but generally caching plugins are a good idea to boost speed.

What server specs are you on?

And is speed the ONLY problem because above you said, "Magento ... battling bugs for months"?

Paul.

 

[Sparetoolparts]

@antropy

my Spec is here:

CPU:	1 x Quad Core 3.50Ghz
Memory:	4x 16GB DDR4 UDIMM
Hard Drive:	2x 250GB SSD RAID1 & 2x 250GB SSD

 

[antropy]

@antropy

my Spec is here:

CPU:	1 x Quad Core 3.50Ghz
Memory:	4x 16GB DDR4 UDIMM
Hard Drive:	2x 250GB SSD RAID1 & 2x 250GB SSD

That's pretty high spec.

How much traffic do you get roughly?

Paul.