Why did my website's traffic drop by 93% in one day?

Topic summary

Multiple Shopify store owners experienced dramatic traffic drops (30-93%) in their analytics starting around November 1-8, 2024. The issue stems from Shopify’s implementation of stricter GDPR cookie consent requirements.

Root Cause:

  • Shopify rolled out changes on October 31st and November 8th that automatically block data tracking for European visitors unless explicit cookie consent is obtained
  • Previously, Shopify tracked users by default until they opted out; now users must opt in first
  • The “Partially collect before consent” option was removed entirely

Impact:

  • Shopify Analytics shows significantly reduced traffic numbers
  • UTM tracking and ad campaign attribution severely affected
  • Third-party analytics (like Google Analytics) may show different numbers since they track independently
  • Some merchants report active checkouts and purchases while analytics show zero visitors online

Attempted Solutions:

  • Installing Shopify’s Privacy & Compliance app (cookie banner)
  • Adjusting customer data protection preferences
  • Multiple support tickets escalated

Current Status:
Shopify support confirms this is expected behavior due to GDPR compliance changes, not a bug. Traffic numbers remain suppressed even with cookie banners installed. Support indicates no further action can be taken and merchants should expect permanently lower analytics numbers going forward. The consensus is that reduced tracking is the “new normal” rather than inflated previous figures.

Summarized with AI on November 7. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.

Checked our cookie/privacy app and ours is also gone, so not sure what happened there :thinking:

Seems we had got the Shopify Privacy & Compliance App installed but not activated, so have now activated that so we will see if that makes any changes..