--- title: 'How I Plan to Revive a Website That Lost 95% of Its Traffic' source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=BAXOuuPD5DM' video_id: 'BAXOuuPD5DM' date: 2026-07-14 duration_sec: 0 --- # How I Plan to Revive a Website That Lost 95% of Its Traffic > Source: [How I Plan to Revive a Website That Lost 95% of Its Traffic](https://youtube.com/watch?v=BAXOuuPD5DM) ## Summary The transcript details a website that was sold for $60,000 in early 2020, peaked at 275,000 monthly page views, but lost over 95% of its traffic after Google's helpful content update. The creator now has the chance to rebuild it and outlines a three-step plan to revive the site, focusing on legitimizing the business, diversifying traffic sources, and monetizing like a real brand. ### Key Points - **Website Sale and Traffic Decline** [00:00] — Sold for $60,000 in early 2020, now potentially worth $400,000. Traffic peaked at 275,000 page views in 2021, but dropped to 13,000 after Google's helpful content update, a 95% loss. - **Opportunity to Rebuild** [01:30] — The creator is excited to rebuild because they love the site and have a lot of quality content to work with. - **Step 1: Legitimize the Website** [02:00] — Treat the site as a business. Send signals to Google and users by following a checklist (referenced from a previous video with Kyle Roof), changing the WordPress theme to a digital magazine style, and considering hosting migration to Cloudways. - **Step 2: Diversify Traffic Sources** [04:30] — Stop relying solely on Google. Repurpose content for social media using AI tools like Pin Generator to create pins and posts for multiple platforms, generating backlinks and referral traffic. - **Step 3: Monetize Like a Real Business** [06:30] — Currently monetized only through ads (Raptive) and Amazon affiliate links. Plan to create additional value by selling products, building a memorable brand, and experimenting with serial content. ### Conclusion The creator plans to revive the website by legitimizing it, diversifying traffic, and monetizing more effectively, turning it into a strong brand. Viewers are encouraged to follow along and apply similar strategies to their own sites. ## Transcript in early 2020 I sold this website for over $60,000 now today its value could be worth over $400,000 but then Google hit and it's value cratered now I have the opportunity to work on it again and it's going to take some serious [Music] work back when I sold this site in 2020 it was getting about 80,000 page views per month basically all from organic search traffic mostly from Google it had so much content and it was good content in fact traffic peaked on this website at about 275,000 page views just one year after we sold it but from January 2021 and on you can see that the traffic started to decline until the helpful content update last August when things really started to take a nose dive as of today the site sits at just about 13,000 page views a month that's over 95% of the traffic that's been lost since that Peak and 88% that's been lost since just a year ago but here's the exciting part I now have a chance to rebuild it and I'm excited for two reasons one because I love this website I was actually kind of bummed that we sold it and two because I have a ton of really good content to work with so now that I've got the site back here is our game plan to revive it step by step step one we're going to legitimize the website look if you're creating content on the internet with the intent to make money for yourself you're a business and it's time to start acting like a business so the first step is to legitimize the website and I'm going to be doing that by sending signals both to Google as well as to the people viewing the website that this is a legitimate entity this involves first doing a bunch of things right on the website I'm going to start with essentially a checklist of items that I covered in a video that I did based on an interview I did with Kyle roof like almost 2 years ago anyway after this video is done you should go check that out and make sure that you've gone through all those steps on your own website it's the first step to legitimacy now I'm also going to change the WordPress theme on this website yes if you look closely you'll realize that this website is currently running the aabot WordPress theme which is my own theme why would I leave my own theme if my theme is good the real reason is that the aabot theme is designed to be very fast and to be very easy to set up for someone who is a beginner at WordPress but this is a huge website with a ton of content and I wanted to have more of the feel of a digital magazine full of amazing content rather than as kind of a a Blog which is what the aabot theme mostly looks like so I'm planning a custom homepage with fantastic navigation to give it that extra touch and make it feel that much more legitimate speaking of making changes changing your website's hosting that can seem like a huge task but it really doesn't have to be this video is being sponsored by cloudways which is who I use for all of my websites for all of the WordPress hosting cloudways makes it super easy for you to migrate your website yourself or they can do it for you they have a fantastic plugin that I've used over a dozen times to migrate websites to cloudways essentially without a hitch and the couple of times where I did have maybe a little bit of a hiccup for some reason something glitched all I had to do was use the chat to reach out to support and in a matter of minutes they were able to find the issue fix the issue and boom the website migration was done and we're back back up and running and for those of you who aren't comfortable migrating your website yourself it just feels like a daunting task even with an easy plug-in that's cool cloudways can do it for you they do that as a service and oftentimes they offer free migrations as a deal to get you to sign up so make sure you check out the link I'll put it at the top of the description of this video so that you can learn more about how you can get your websites onto cloudways for the most reliable the the fastest the most secure hosting you can get for your WordPress website all right now for this website the next step is we're going to need to diversify our traffic sources we need to stop relying on Google sure if I legitimize this business enough it may be that Google starts to trust it and we start to win back that organic traffic that we used to have from Google that alone could potentially bring the site right back to where it was but I'm not counting on it and even if that does happen there's no way I'm going to rely on a single source for the traffic for this business going for forward now here's where this project starts to get really exciting I mentioned before I have a ton of really good content on this website it's going to be so easy to repurpose a bunch of this content for social media this right here is a perfect opportunity to use AI as a tool to help you out for example I've been playing with this tool it's called pin generator and essentially I just put in the URL for a blog post on my website or I can use a CSV file and literally put in all the URLs of every blog post on my website and in a matter of seconds pin generator literally generates a whole bunch of pins for me it'll write the pin descriptions it'll pull the images from the Articles and use those within Pinterest it's got a ton of built-in templates which I can customize for my own brand I can add my logo I can use my colors I can use my fonts and generate all these pins in a matter of seconds something that I used to spend considerably more time doing until I got pin generator I can also take all of this amazing content and use it to generate all sorts of social media post for all the different social media platforms that are applicable for this audience which is going to give me much more diverse sources of traffic than just Google it's also going to give me tons of backlinks and it's going to start referring traffic it's going to make my brand known and do so much that's going to give me legitimacy that's going to get me more Google traffic so it's like this win-win win all right now step three we are going to monetize this like a real business so far the site's only really been monetized through ads through rapv uh who used to be ad Thrive if you've been around a long time as well as through some Amazon affiliate links it's almost hard to believe that that's it it's time to take this a step further by finding good opportunities to create additional value for my audience something I can actually sell I'll actually further legitimize the business again helping with the Google thing but also helping make me a bunch more money this is the key when you build a real brand which doesn't come just by creating awesome content it also comes by being a real business you further legitimize yourself with Google and you further legitimize yourself with your users a memorable brand is what keeps people coming back once somebody has invested not just their time reading your content but they've made the choice to invest some money in your brand at that point that's when you truly become memorable I'm also experimenting with turning some of this content that we have into serial content which is something that we'll talk about more in another video because trust me this is going to be big so that's the plan I'm excited to jump in and get started turning this really big website into a really big brand and really you should be doing the same for your site now if you want to follow along or you want to start making a legitimate website business for yourself go check out this video where I show you the Steps step by step to start making your website more legit I'll see you there [Music]