Greater activity on a site means more traffic, right? I’d say that’s the case for the majority of websites. More content = more traffic. New design = longer time spent on site, increased page views. As users of websites we don’t like to log on to the same site twice and see nothing new. The reason we re-visit a site is to get new information…
When i was away on holidays for a week, i didn’t post or schedule any posts to go live on this site. When i came back i started blogging again. So for a period of 8 or 9 days, this site was basically dead. Nothing new.
Of course the 2,000+ posts on it are enough to bring in traffic through google but would i see a drop in traffic because i told people i’d be away for the week? I wasn’t sure.
Results are in…
Over the last 30 days, google analytics tells me traffic has dropped 50%. Ouch. There were a couple of days before i went away where i accidentally redirected some search engine traffic to non existant pages, which explains the small dip early in the month, but overall, the graph speaks for itself.
Traffic did drop significantly while i was away and has been picking up since i started blogging again on May 31st. In 2011, this blog is averaging about 450 visits per day but for the week i was missing, traffic was averaging just 170 visits per day.
Don’t go on holiday
So the moral of the story is, don’t ever go on holiday or tell people you’re going on holiday if you’re a blogger and you don’t want a sharp dip in traffic 🙂 Of course it depends on the blog and the content. theleavingcert.com could go without content for weeks and have a sudden spike in traffic… it’s driven largely by real world events and calendars.
But this little case study showed what i hoped it would show – more activity = more traffic. Because people get bored easily and won’t keep revisiting something they’ve seen before unless it’s extremely high quality, useful information which clearly isn’t the case with my blog posts 