Greetings. Was referred here by someone that spoke quite highly of the community and admit I'm impressed with the activity I've seen in the 5 minutes I've been here. Look forward to delving into some long put-off research topics, but first...
From 2005 until February of this year my site ran strictly HTML (with tables until 2011 :yikes:) and enjoyed steady growth almost every month for at least the last 3 years. I, myself, relaunched the site four times in those years, continually upgrading the design but not the technology. Each relaunch was greeted with a surge in traffic and by January 2012 we were beginning to crest 50,000 monthly visits with regularity.
As the site grew it was clear I needed CMS functionality on the back end and a search/filter feature on the front end. It is a complex & custom content rich site. This year, for the first time ever, I paid money for the site’s development (a good deal of money) on the expressionengine platform while I built the majority of the CSS. I am absolutely in love with the way the end product looks, feels, and works, but…
We are now down to 24,000 visits a month, dropping about 7%-10% each month…? We have done a lot of troubleshooting for IE, as my customer base is not technologically inclined and likely using outdated IE browsers (and apparently there was a lot of browser crashing at first launch), but this does not seem to recover any traffic.
We have installed searchmap add-ons, got google webtools going, everything we can think of, yet 6 months later I am still losing traffic. I feel like my original dev team has run out of ideas.
A 2011 - 2012 graph of our analytics shows a steady incline up until the day of EE launch and then a steady decline ever since. I have not changed our marketing, we still hold our first page google spots (usually in top 3 returns) I have not altered a thing other than relaunch in EE… and it’s killing my site. I have watched 3 years of traffic building just disappear.
I don’t know if I should be looking for an analytics specialist, an seo specialist, or someone to go through a myriad of EE/jquery/php code looking for red flags, and I can’t afford to go hiring one of each. Honestly, we put all our pennies into this site relaunch. I don’t mind paying for help on this, but I’ve got to be smart about obtaining it.
Does this ring a similar bell in anyone’s mind? That’s kind of what I’m hoping beyond hope for. Next hope is some advise on what type of help will make the best use of my money, and where to go about procuring it ... or perhaps someone out there simply enjoys a puzzle?
Am really at a loss and keen to hear any suggestions. Really really keen with a strong tinge of desperation. Many thanks in advance for your time.
