Why your Shopify store is not getting traffic or sales

Open the store’s analytics and look at sessions for the last 30 days.

• Very few sessions: a traffic problem. Read the next three sections.
• Sessions, and nothing added to a basket: a problem with the pages or the offer. Go to the last two sections.

A store that Google has not indexed gets no search traffic whatever else is done. Search Google for site: followed by the store’s domain. If nothing appears, start with our guide to a Shopify store not showing on Google.

Search Console’s Performance report lists every search the store was shown for, with its position. Two patterns are common.

• The store appears only for its own name. Google does not yet connect it with the products it sells.
• The store appears for product searches, on the second page or lower. The pages exist and are being outranked.

Product pages lose for a small number of reasons.

• The description is the manufacturer’s, word for word, and identical on every other store.
• The page title is the product code, not the words a buyer types.
• The collection pages have no text at all, so nothing ranks for the wider search.
• No other website links to the store.

Write descriptions of your own, name products the way buyers do, and give each collection page an introduction that says what is in it and who it is for.

Visitors who leave without buying are usually stopped by one of four things: the page is slow, the price or delivery cost appears late, the photographs do not show the product properly, or the store gives no reason to trust it. Test the store’s speed first, because apps added to a store often add scripts to every page. Our guide to checking your website speed shows how.

Visits from people who were never going to buy look like a conversion problem and are a targeting problem. If the visits come from advertising, read the searches the ads appeared for: our guide to checking whether Google Ads is wasting your budget covers that report.