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 
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.
