Yesterday I told you about how my blog has halved in number regarding the amount of daily visitors that I get, and a reader left a comment offering perhaps a reason for this. So this morning I took a deep dive into my statistics to see if I could find the metric that has caused such a drop in numbers and I found it, and it should be of no surprise to anyone, it’s all my own doing, lol đŸ™‚
Back on October the 22nd last year I changed the format of the blog. I had run the blog on a custom made theme that I built over ten years ago. Last year I decided that it was time to change the format of the blog as I felt that the old theme was rather clunky, so I opted instead for a ready made theme provided by WordPress. Something that I felt was cleaner and easier to navigate and something that was more suited for Mobile users. My old theme rarely supported a mobile version whereas this new version completely supports it.
Well guess what, starting on October the 22nd of 2022 (funny how that happens, eh ;)) it drastically affected the number of daily visitors to the site.
What was the metric in question? It was SEARCH ENGINES!!
Starting on 10/22/22 every hit from DuckDuckGo was eliminated, as in I no longer get any referrals from DuckDuckGo whatsoever. But the biggest impact was through Google search, I lost roughly 200 hits a day from Google search alone. That pretty much accounts for why my numbers went from 600 visitors a day to 300 visitors a day.
The only plus side to this is that eventually I will start to build up the Google search hits once again, it’s just going to take some time. So that is the bottom line, the drop in viewership is my own damn fault because I changed the theme of this blog from my custom built one to a generic pre-made theme.
So, in honor of me being a complete and utter plank, here is a plank spanking for you, haha.
This is indeed a tough one. I do enjoy the new format,but also want you to have more viewers so I do not know how to respond to this one.from what I remember about it was there was some issue with the old format and you were offline for about a week and you had to change the format to get viewers back and I think that date saw many blogs from world press have similar issues and they decided to leave rather than make new changes and that would affect your numbers as well.thanks again for all you share and I am just glad you are still around as well.
Jim
Jim,
I do understand the natural drop in numbers, I mean I can only speak for myself, I rarely, if ever, visit any spanking blogs anymore. Since Blogger did the whole ‘sign in’ thing I simply can’t be arsed, and other than Blogger blogs there aren’t that many around anymore. With that said, maybe I am missing out and there are some really good blogs still out there. Prior to Blogger doing the sign in I had noticed that picture blogs were simply showing your standard every day spanking photos, interspersed with images taken from this blog. Obviously there isn’t much need for me to visit blogs that are just regurgitating images that I have already posted. Maybe I will go through my links list today to see what I am missing.
Rich