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Website traffic dropped to 0 after theme install.
Hello,
I have a small website where I write some gaming guides and resources for various titles. It has seen some steady growth from search and I was averaging 400 – 450 users a day. It suddenly started to take a dip and I noticed my site speed was causing some issues with my search rankings.
Last night, I was searching for optimized themes and apparently ‘the fastest’ and switch to a premium theme called ‘Newspaper’. I logged into my analytics today and noticed there hasn’t been a single user to the website.
All of my URLs have stayed the same so I’m not positive what might be causing this. Anyone have an idea?
Edit: oh my gosh… I think it’s the analytics. I’m guessing the code might be wrong when I switched themes.
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6 Replies
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Is it possible your analytics tracking code was in the theme functions.php file (WordPress), so when you switched the theme it removed the tracking?
Just a thought. Theme shouldn’t drop your traffic to zero.
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Agree to the comments. I’ve been there, lesson learned. If you change your theme, you need to re enter all your tracking codes.
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Check your analytic code if it’s still there. Maybe you installed it inside the theme
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I use Newspaper too, it’s not the most optimized theme around, but likes others have said, it’s probably not the theme that’s dumped your traffic. I’d check if you’re still ranking for keywords on Google; you may have hits from other sources that could have been severed.
Regarding potential issues from injecting analytics code directly: just use a plugin. Theme header/footer injections can easily get overwritten, especially on themes that have frequent updates–Newspaper being a prime example of this.
You could use Google Site Kit to inject all Google tags; Analytics, Tag Manager, AdSense. Plugins like Rank Math also support analytics code, along with their SEO magic.
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Do you use WordPress? I find using ‘insert header footers’ plugin worth installing as, once you’ve pasted you GA code into it (plus any others) they are always there, regardless of theme changes or updates.
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Sounds like you figured it out. But I just wanted to commiserate with you on that panic I feel once a week or so lol
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