What to do when your Pinterest traffic drops

Most traffic drops have a simple cause. The trick is to work through them in order instead of changing everything at once. Here is a calm way to find out what happened, and what to do about it.

Step 1: is it real?

Traffic naturally rises and falls with seasons, weekdays and holidays. Compare a few weeks with the same period before, and the same days of the week. Look in more than one place: Pinterest analytics for impressions and outbound clicks, and your own site analytics for visits from Pinterest.

Step 2: check the basics

• Do your links work? A changed URL or a broken redirect sends visitors nowhere.
• Does your site load? A slow or down site loses clicks. Open your pages on a phone.
• Is tracking intact? A removed analytics tag looks exactly like a drop in traffic.
• Did you change something? A new theme, new URLs or a clean-up can all move numbers.
• Is it the season? Many topics have a natural peak and a quiet period.

Pinterest’s own guidance lists broken or slow destination pages and pins that do not match their page among the causes of declining performance. PinSleuth’s Pin Health checks the pages your pins point to, so these are easy to spot.

Step 3: look at which pins changed

Open your analytics and sort pins by how much their impressions and clicks changed. A drop on a few pins is a different problem from a drop across the board.

Step 4: change one thing at a time

1. Fix the cause you foundA repaired link, a faster page or a restored tracking tag comes before anything creative.
2. Make fresh pins for the pins that fadedSee our post on giving old posts a second life.
3. Change one thing at a timeIf you change the image, title and description together, you cannot tell which helped.
4. Wait two weeksPins take time to be shown. Judge over weeks, not days.

An example, step by step

Say your Pinterest visits fell by a third over three weeks. Walking the path above, it might go like this:

1. Real?Same four weeks last month had a holiday week in them. Not a like for like comparison. Adjust, and it is still down about a quarter.
2. Basics?The site loads fine. But a plugin update two weeks ago changed the URL structure of five posts, and their pins now lead to a “page not found”.
3. Which pins?The pins for those five posts account for most of the loss. Everything else is flat.
4. FixRestore the old URLs, or redirect them to the new ones. Check each pin opens the right page.
5. WaitTwo weeks later, the clicks are back to normal. Nothing needed rewriting.

When to just wait

Sometimes the right answer is to do nothing for two weeks and watch.

Pinterest moves slowly. A dip right after you publish is normal while pins are still being shown to people. If you cannot find a cause and your pages are healthy, keep publishing at your usual pace and check again in two or three weeks.

Quick questions