I have 3 websites. One of them is a forum and the other two are blogs. I have had all 3 for 10+ years at this point. The forum isn't very active but it has a few people that are on posting daily. Many people left over the last few years. I think they just moved on. Maybe they decided to stick with social media, idk.

The two other ones that are blogs, they used to have great traffic. Between the three I was able to bring in a decent amount of money via Amazon Associates and and ad company that ran ads on all three sites. in 2019 I was making around $1,200 a month just from the ads, not including the money I got through Amazon (I mostly just put that into my account to buy stuff, never got a check).

Since then everything fell apart. Traffic dropped way off a cliff. I am lucky to get $10 a month and I get maybe $3 a month from Amazon. I have been trying to figure this out for years at this point. The sharpest decline happened in 2019 to 2020 and then another one in 2023. The first one I lost half my traffic and the second decline I lost most of what was left.

The two websites run on WordPress, I am not sure if that matters.

And my forum is on Xenforo's software. Again, not sure if that matters.

I am hoping to get this sorted. I don't want to give up but I feel like I am only holding onto these domains out of spite and I should probably just cut my losses!

....

Anyways, My name is Ryan. lol Sorry about that long introduction. I had to rant about my issues first.

Hey Ryyyan! Welcome to WebInsiders! I'm glad you joined. Sounds like you have some great experience running blogs and forums.

I wouldn’t give up yet on your sites, but I’d stop looking at the 3 sites as one big problem.

Pick the one that still has the best signs of life and focus on that first.

Can I ask what niches the two blogs were about? Maybe you can revive one of them by posting great content, maybe start a YouTube Channel to compliment the blog, YouTube is a great source of traffic and where a lot of your audience might be searching for things that used to visit your blog for answers.

The drops you mentioned line up pretty well with Google updates. A lot of older blogs got hit hard around 2019/2020, then again in 2023. Especially sites that had older posts ranking for years, affiliate links, display ads, product-type content, or content that hadn’t been updated much.

First thing I’d do is open Google Search Console and look at:

• which pages lost the most traffic

• whether impressions dropped or just clicks

• any indexing issues

• manual actions/security issues

• pages Google crawled but didn’t index

For the blogs, I’d find the posts that used to make money and update those before writing anything new. Not just changing the date, but actually improving them. New info, better formatting, remove outdated stuff, add real experience/photos if possible, fix broken Amazon links, etc. You could use ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude to help you research and add new updated info, but be careful of the blogs sounds 'too AI' written.

If nothing changes, then yeah, maybe it’s time to let one or two go. But I wouldn’t rage-quit all three without at least doing a proper cleanup first. Old domains with real history can still be worth something, but they usually need work, not just waiting.

Hope that helps!