At first I couldn’t believe it. For some odd reason the traffic on my website about dogs dropped by half within a day or so. I wondered what I had done, and I know, I should keep better notes on all of my websites, but with many websites, I just couldn’t remember what I did.
I get it. I know that’s why they say to keep meticulous notes. In fact, when I created my Yahoo/AdSense Course, I wrote over 500 pages of notes and printed over a ream of paper of even the smallest of changes in my work. It paid off in four figures a month. Crazy.
But when your traffic dies overnight, you panic.
Well, I’m not one for panicking, but it did bother me. I wanted to know what changed. And the site in question is based on WordPress, so I knew I could track down the culprit by process of elimination.
As I racked my brain I remembered one thing I changed. The theme.
I follow @mashable, the Twitter from Mashable.com and one of their stories was the top 14 WordPress premium themes. So I jumped in with a beautiful theme called Demet and made a few modifications and off I went.
Incredible as it may seem, I dropped my Amazing Grace theme (sorry Vlad), and the traffic tanked as well. Here’s a graph of my traffic statistics.
First you’ll see that the traffic for this website is all over the chart, but averages 350 views a day. But the day I installed Demet, my traffic went away.
Now, you could say that it was because the template wasn’t registering the stats. And I’d probably agree with you, but I’m also running other analytical programs on the site that agree. Even Google’s AdSense data shows there were fewer exposures of their ads during the period.
So I don’t know about you, but to me this is enough proof that although the Demet theme looks spiffy, it’s not for me.
