Why Is Website Traffic Lower On Holidays? Less People Online & More People Offline With Family…But There’s More To It

Yes there is a reason that SEO specialists typically hate holidays, aside from having to leave the house and having to leave the outer-net (ie. the real world of other people) and it is that website traffic tends to drop around the time of the holidays. The reason this happens is pretty self exclamatory, as it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that people are not on the internet as much during holidays. And I’m not talking about traffic dropping during the holiday season here, and I’m not talking about the holiday and E-Commerce buzz that comes with Black Friday, Thanksgiving and Christmas, I am talking about the actual holiday itself, and of how on actual Christmas day or Thanksgiving day, there is a pretty sizeable traffic drop, in the range of 25 to 30% because people are just not online as much.

People eat and watch football with the family, what they do not do is read articles on Finance and about why is website traffic lower on holidays, they eat, drink and be merry. There are some other, less than obvious reasons why your traffic may go down on holidays though, and while they are more subtle, they definitely play a role, and so in this blog post, let’s look at the dreaded holiday traffic drop.

Why Is Website Traffic Lower On Holidays? Dinner With The Family

This one is a no brainer, unless you really don’t like your family or you are really bored with having tons of food and football or something, you can expect to not be looking at your phone as much during the Christmas holiday. I used to be the exception to the rule for this because I am an SEO Specialist, and my sibling is a computer programmer, and we both jointly would build up and sell affiliate income sites during the year. You can imagine we had some fun during the holidays when we had some free time after dinner, making changes to the site, building programs for the website, testing new affiliate schemes, posting content, and the like.

Typically however, this is not the case for 99.99% of the population. People are glued to the television not their computers or phones, and on top of this, people typically are less focused on the holidays, you are a lot less likely to read a high intensity finance article when you’re worried about going over to your mom’s place for brunch.

Why Website Traffic Plummets Reason Number 2, Higher Down Time Among Servers

This is another factor that I think would come into play, and though I couldn’t find much research on the phenomenon, I know almost for a fact this to be true. I get enough server downtime out of Hostinger when all of their programmers are at full capacity and when it is all systems go and all of their employees are there, I have to imagine that staffing becomes something of an issue when federal holidays come into play. And while some have 24 hour systems, someone working at Bluehost that is taking your call to fix your website at 5 in the morning on Christmas day is not exactly happy to be doing so, and is not going to be putting his best foot forward, I say we can add this to reasons for the holiday traffic dip.

Why Site Traffic Falls, Less Engagement as Well as Less Traffic

Another reason why I think that you will see your actual pageviews fall as much and possibly even more than you will see your daily visitors fall, is that people who are on your site are more rushed, and while in certain buyable keywords their may be more engagement on e-commerce platforms, I say that on ad platforms there is less engagement, because there is less time on the website, because they are in a rush, they want to go and see family, etc. etc. I say this is why your pageviews plummet even more than your visitors do on major holidays!

Traffic May Also Fall Due to E-Commerce Websites Getting All The Action

Another thought I had is that there is only so much internet traffic out there, only so many people and only so many eyeballs able to read blog posts and click on ads with any measure of engagement. If most people are using their internet or computer time in order to go on Amazon, Ebay or Etsy with buying intent, there are less people able to read your Finance blog post for 15 minutes, or search your website about lawn maintenance, because they are on the major websites, so this could also very well play a role.

Final Thoughts On Why Is Website Traffic Lower On Holidays, a Time For Family

And that’s why your website traffic is lower on holidays! I recommend offsetting this dip with sales discounts and with an email marketing campaign to ramp your traffic and engagement back up. You may even get a sales increase on holidays alongside your traffic dip, because more of your customers will be flushed with Christmas money and will have buying intent. Hope you enjoyed reading, for more details and information on all things business and finance, comment down below or subscribe for more info!

Cheers!

*Inflation Hedging.com

Sources:

https://www.bankrate.com/banking/cds/cd-rates/

https://money.cnn.com/data/markets/

Disclaimer: The opinions and documentation contained within this article and on this blog are the sole property of inflationhedging.com and are not to be copyrighted or reproduced in any manner, else legal action within the rights of the United States legal code could be use to obtain recompense. All articles and blog posts are the sole opinions of the writers of the blog, and are not necessarily in line with what exactly will work for you, you should consult a CPA, Tax Professional, or Financial Professional to determine what exact financial needs are in line with your interests. Also, from time to time, certain links on this website will be used to generate affiliate commissions, in order to support the health and growth of our website, health and business.