Why Does Website Traffic Decrease on Weekends?

Normal website traffic follows a bell curve every week. This is happening since the time internet became a public thing, that is around the last 2 decades. So, the maximum traffic is usually around Wednesday and Thursday. It is interesting fact that the whole earth got many changes in these two decades (including facing a pandemic), yet the pattern of humans remained the same. It is not astonishing that marketers and SEO specialists hate holidays. If you are a webmaster, probably you have noticed the cyclical decline of traffic every weekend but probably never thought about who browses your site on the weekend.

Peoples are Busy on the Weekends

People who work in the physical world, usually can not give much importance to many work from Monday to Friday. The world is like a holiday to the work of people! So, we have forgotten that fixing a broken drainage pipe, despite it being urgent can not be carried out on the working days. To phone a plumber, they need the time to inspect, decide, phone the plumber and match the schedule.

The families with 75% to 100% working members have a lot of works. Naturally, surfing the internet (outside the websites of the service providers) is not among their important work.

Peoples Enjoy the Weekends

Even if those people do not have much-scheduled maintenance work, they find watching the television or cooking a special dish at home, or eating out or visiting a place of interest more interesting. Even if they click some sort of email or mobile notification to visit your site, they will quickly check the new content or product.

Maybe some of this traffic shifts to the other online sites such as review sites, large e-commerce sites, video hosting sites etc.

Analyze the Drop-Outs

These people, who are not becoming active on the weekends on our websites can be salaried people or businessmen. We will never know what they do but, surely, their age should fall within 30 to 60 years age bracket, i.e. they are working peoples. That means they have the purchasing capability.

Then Who Visit Our Websites During the Weekends?

The people who work online surf each others’ websites. But that would be just a small fraction. The rest of the traffic would be the college students, mostly unmarried. The rest of the traffic depends on the niche of the website.

For example, a person wanted to fix his Android phone or a laptop may land on our webpage to fix Missing/Bad FileProvider for Freshchat (Android error code 354), or had some DIY project in mind and landed . This traffic is not “worthless”, although it is seen that the conversion rate during the weekends in lower.

What is the Importance of this Observation?

Naturally, you can invest more time during the weekend behind work – re-designing, preparing content, keyword research, rolling out the new version of a plugin on the production site, migrating to a different server. You can ask your traffic about their holidays and plan to keep them happy. You can creatively use the gathered data to make your website more engaging even during the weekends.