Guide · Technical
Traffic dropped.
Now what?
The instinct is to change something immediately. Almost every time we are called in for this, the change made in the first hour has to be undone later. Diagnose first — the list of possible causes is short.
Published 2026-09-24 · Formory Group
First: is it traffic, or is it measurement?
More “traffic drops” than anyone admits are analytics that stopped recording — a tag removed during an update, a consent banner change, a filter someone added. Check whether enquiries actually fell at the same time. If the phone is ringing as usual, the problem is the report.
Compare against the same period last year rather than last month. Seasonality accounts for a large share of apparent drops in trades and clinics alike.
Second: did the site break?
Open it on a phone, on mobile data, in a private window. Check that key pages return properly rather than erroring. Check the certificate has not expired — a lapsed certificate makes every browser warn people away and it happens quietly.
Then check the indexing report for a spike in errors. A robots.txt rule left over from a staging site, or a noindex tag applied site-wide during a rebuild, will do exactly this and is fixed in minutes once found.
Third: did the results page change?
Search your main terms yourself. If an AI answer or an expanded map pack now sits where your result used to be visible, your position may be unchanged while your clicks have halved. That is a different problem with a different fix.
Check whether a competitor has published something substantial, or whether a directory has moved above you. Both are recoverable; neither is fixed by panicking at the site.
Fourth: did you change something three weeks ago?
Rebuilds, migrations, a new cookie banner, a plugin, a redesigned menu. Effects rarely show the same week. Write down what changed in the previous month before assuming an algorithm update.
If a migration happened and pages are reported as not found, go back to the redirect map. That is the single most common cause we see.
The two responses that make it worse.
Rewriting everything at once, so that when traffic recovers or does not, nobody can say why. And buying links in a hurry, which turns a temporary dip into a lasting problem.
Change one thing, write down the date, and wait. Search results take weeks to respond to anything, which is frustrating and is also the only way to learn what worked.
Questions
The usual questions.
How long before a fix shows?
Two to six weeks for most things, longer for anything involving re-crawling a large number of pages. Same-week recoveries usually mean the problem was measurement rather than ranking.
Was it an algorithm update?
Sometimes, and it is also the most convenient explanation for an agency that changed something. Check your own timeline before accepting it.
Should I resubmit my sitemap?
It costs nothing and occasionally helps after a structural change. It will not fix a ranking drop on its own.
Two minutes
Where does your
own site land?
Everything above came from opening real websites. Yours takes ten seconds: we load it the way a customer would and say what we find, including when the honest answer is that nothing needs doing.
Worth a
conversation?
No pitch deck and no discovery call. Tell us the trade and the city, and we will say what we would do and what it costs.