How to Drive Traffic to Your Website
Practical ways to drive more traffic to your website in 2026: technical fixes, content that answers real questions, good design, and where AI search and social now fit in.
How do you drive traffic to your website? By giving people, and now AI tools, a clear reason to point searchers your way: content that answers the exact question they searched, a site that's fast and easy to use on a phone, and a presence beyond your own site, on Google Business Profile, social channels and the pages other sites link to. At Code23 we build websites and marketplaces that are meant to be found, not just built, so traffic isn't an afterthought bolted on once the site is live. We plan for it from the start of the build: clean technical foundations, content that matches what people actually search for, and a design that keeps visitors around once they arrive.
There's still an enormous amount of traffic moving around the web every day, and some of it now arrives from AI tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini, or from the links in Google's AI Overviews at the top of search results. Below, we'll walk through what web traffic actually is, why it matters to your bottom line, and the practical ways to bring more of the right kind to your site.
Contents
- What is web traffic?
- Why does web traffic matter?
- How do you increase your web traffic?
- Technical improvements
- Optimising content
- Good web design
- Strong UX
- Guest posting
- Content promotion
What is web traffic?
In the same way road traffic refers to how many cars are using a particular road, web traffic refers to how many web users are visiting a particular website. Using free tools such as Google Analytics, you can see how many people visit, where they came from, which page they landed on and which pages they viewed most. Visitors who decline analytics cookies may be modelled or missing, so treat the numbers as a strong guide rather than an exact count.
Broadly speaking, web traffic can be grouped by where each visit came from. Google Analytics sorts visits into channels, including these:
- Paid: visitors who click an advert, such as a pay-per-click search ad, a display ad or a paid social post
- Organic search: visitors who click an unpaid search result after searching for something related to your business
- Social, referral and email: visitors who follow a link from a social post, another website or an email
- Direct: visitors who type your address or use a bookmark
- AI assistants: visitors who click a link in a tool such as ChatGPT or Gemini
Not all traffic is human. Imperva's 2025 Bad Bot Report found automated traffic made up 51% of all web traffic in 2024. Google Analytics automatically filters out known bots, so most of it won't appear in your reports.
Some bots are useful, such as search engine crawlers that index your pages and tools that check your links still work. AI crawlers, such as OpenAI's OAI-SearchBot, fetch pages so AI tools can cite them, and blocking them can keep you out of those answers. Other bots scrape content without permission or flood a site with requests to knock it offline, which is known as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
Why does web traffic matter?
Web traffic is important to your site for the following reasons:
- There’s more opportunity to convert visitors and boost sales
- It can help to increase your brand awareness online
- You can earn extra revenue through sponsored ads and posts
Your web conversion rate is the percentage of your visitors who do what you want them to do on your site (e.g. to complete a contact form, sign up to a newsletter, or buy something). Without web traffic, there’s no one to convert so the two work hand in hand to affect your revenue stream. So the goal is to bring in more of the right visitors, then make it easy for them to act. The question is how.
How do you increase your web traffic?
Technical improvements
The ‘behind the scenes’ technical set up of your website can affect factors such as page loading speed, indexing and crawling, which make a difference to the user experience and your page ranking, both of which can drive traffic to your site. Fixing technical problems, such as broken links, pages search engines can't crawl or index, and missing or duplicate page titles, helps search engines find and understand your pages, which can improve your traffic. Technical fixes are often a quicker place to start than new content, because they improve pages you already have. Our technical SEO checklist covers the essentials.
Here are a few other technical performance tips that can help increase traffic to websites:
- Fast loading pages: slow pages lose visitors before they see anything, and page experience, including loading speed, is one of the signals Google's ranking systems use when several results are equally relevant
- Simple navigation: clear menus and crawlable links help visitors and search engines find your pages, so keep your most important pages within easy reach of your homepage
- Internal links: one way to help Google find your content is to include internal links which can improve page ranking and bring in more traffic
Optimising content
To optimise your content is to make it more attractive to your users. One simple solution for this is to give them what they want. Research who your typical users are, then write content that meets their needs and uses the words they search with. Clear, scannable formatting, with descriptive headings, short paragraphs and lists where they help, makes your content easier to read, skim and quote. If you're still getting to grips with the basics, our guide to what SEO actually is is a good place to start.
"The team at Code23 were extremely professional, patient and proactive with the build of our new website, providing added value through polite suggestions on improvements and an experienced insight into how we could improve our SEO."
Good web design
When it comes to the design of your website, simplicity usually helps. Keeping web pages, navigational menus and the search bar simple allows visitors to easily find what they’re after by drawing attention to what you want them to see. For many sites, a large share of visitors arrive on a phone, so check the device split in your own analytics. If your site is hard to use on mobile, you'll lose some of those visitors. Google also uses the mobile version of your pages for indexing and ranking, so content missing from your mobile site can cost you visibility. So make sure your layout looks good and is easy to use on a phone. In fact, web design is such an important factor when it comes to increasing ROI (return on investment), we've written a whole article on how good web design can increase ROI.
Strong UX
We’ve discussed how your site looks, now let’s focus on the functionality. Creating a positive user journey with a site that’s easy to navigate makes it more likely visitors will stick around. Where several pages are equally relevant, a better page experience can help in search, and it can also bring about the following benefits:
- More returning visitors and word-of-mouth recommendations
- Visitors staying on your site for longer
- A higher conversion rate
One trick for achieving a strong UX journey, with the user at the heart of the design, is to think like a user. Ask yourself what keywords, questions and content they would search for to find the solution to their needs. Answer relevant searches clearly and make the page crawlable and useful; this can improve eligibility and relevance but does not guarantee higher rankings or traffic.
Guest posting
As the name suggests, guest posts are where you write a blog, article, or white paper to appear on another website. Doing so can position your brand as an authority in your sector and send referral traffic from readers who click through to your site. Treat guest posts as a way to reach a new audience rather than a way to build ranking links. Google counts keyword-stuffed links in guest posts as link spam, and any paid placement should carry a rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow" link. Where you place the link matters too. In one test, Backlinko's Brian Dean found a link in a "helpful resources" section of a guest post brought in 78% more traffic than his author bio link. See Backlinko's guide to increasing website traffic.
Content promotion
You could have the most wonderful content in the world but if no-one’s visiting your site to see it, it won’t impact your business revenue. So let's look at some common ways of promoting content so it drives more traffic to your site.
- Paid: there are plenty of options when it comes to paid promotion, including pay-per-click advertising, targeted ads on search engines and sponsored posts on social media. It can bring in traffic quickly, for as long as you keep paying, while you continue working on organic and AI-search visibility. Our SEO vs PPC comparison covers how to balance the two
- Organic: social media is a useful way to share your content without paying for reach. The key is to use the social channels your target audience use the most, then create strong, quotable content with images and videos, and make it easy for visitors to share by adding social share buttons to your site
- Search, maps and AI: if customers visit you or you travel to them, keep your Google Business Profile accurate to improve its eligibility and relevance for local searches. Google's AI Overviews and tools such as ChatGPT can also link to your pages. For Google, your pages need to be indexed and eligible to show in normal search results; for ChatGPT search, your site mustn't block OpenAI's OAI-SearchBot crawler
- Competitions: giveaways on your website and social channels can bring in visitors, as long as you link entrants to the pages you want them to see. In the UK, prize promotions need clear terms under the CAP Code, a free draw mustn't become a paid lottery, and you should only email people who've agreed to hear from you or who meet the soft opt-in rules
- Influencers: with their ready-made audience of followers, influencers can put your brand in front of people who already listen to them and send some of them to your site. In the UK, any post you've paid for or given free products for must be clearly labelled as an ad, and both you and the influencer are responsible for getting that right
Frequently asked questions
What’s the fastest way to increase traffic to my website?
Technical fixes are often a quick win: broken links, slow pages and messy navigation can be holding you back right now, and correcting them doesn’t need new content. Paid advertising can bring visitors in quickly too, once your ads are approved and running, while you continue working on organic and AI-search visibility. Talk to us if you want a hand working out which technical problems to fix first.
Is social media or SEO better for driving website traffic?
They do different jobs. SEO and AI-search visibility can build traffic you do not pay for per click, but it takes time to establish and still needs ongoing work. Social media can drive visitors much faster, especially with paid promotion, but that traffic usually drops off soon after you stop posting or paying. Many businesses use both: SEO for the long term, social and paid for quicker results.
Can AI tools like ChatGPT send traffic to my website?
Yes. Tools such as ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews now answer questions directly and sometimes link out to the sites they drew the answer from. To show up in Google’s AI Overviews, a page needs to be indexed and eligible to appear in normal search results, and Google says no special optimisation is needed. ChatGPT search only features sites that let OpenAI’s search crawler in. Beyond that, clear, specific answers from a source people trust give you a better chance of being cited. It’s a newer channel worth watching, not a replacement for solid SEO.
How do I know which part of my website is losing me traffic?
Look at your own data before guessing. Google Search Console shows which pages and searches are losing clicks or impressions, and which pages Google hasn’t indexed. Google Analytics shows which landing pages people leave quickly. If you want a second pair of eyes on it, talk to us.
Next step
If you want more of the right traffic landing on your site, start with what’s actually stopping people finding you today, not a long list of tactics.
Talk to us about your SEO: which pages matter, the keywords you already rank for and the technical problems worth fixing first. If you want to know whether AI tools mention you, ask about our AI visibility audit.
Code23 has been building websites since 2005, and we’ve run Google Ads for clients for over 10 years. We’ll tell you if what you need is a quick technical fix rather than a long project.
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