Success story: how I turned my dying business Pinterest account around
WHERE IT ALL WENT WRONG“As a multi-disciplinary designer, my pins reflected the wide scope of my services and interests – branding, graphic design, website design, interiors, and even crochet. And for a while this seemed to be working just fine – until it wasn’t.”
For longer than I’d like to admit, I was pouring almost all of my social media energy into Instagram – Pinterest as a place to promote myself wasn’t even on my radar.
But I kept hearing more about more people talking about it as a must-have platform for creatives. So in May 2024, I decided to give it a go.
I setup a proper Pinterest account for my business and got to work – posting on average 1 fresh pin per day and saving dozens more about anything and everything that related to my services.
As a multi-disciplinary designer, my pins reflected the wide scope of my services and interests – branding, graphic design, website design, interiors, and even crochet. And for a while this seemed to be working just fine.
My numbers were slowly ticking upwards every month – it wasn’t crazy growth, but for someone who was just starting out (and knowing Pinterest is alllllllll about the long game), it felt like things were moving in the right direction.
Until March 2026, when all of a sudden my stats started nosediving. What had been slowly growing each month quickly started moving backwards – AND FAST.
The downfall
My monthly impressions had slowly grown from a low of 43k in late 2024, to a high of 196k in February 2026. Then seemingly overnight, something switched.
For a few months I wasn’t really sure what to do. I thought maybe it was just the time of year, a blip, and things would turn around again.
But by May 2026, my monthly impressions had shrunk from 196k to just 88k, and I knew something had to be done. It was time to perform CPR on my account. WAH.
So I rolled up my sleeves and started doing some digging, researching online to see whether there had been a change in Pinterest’s algorithm in 2026.
Lo and behold, I stumbled across this article from PinFreshly and everything clicked. Reading through their explanation of the updates, I realised exactly why my account was dying a quick death – and what I needed to do to bring it back to life.
Where I was going wrong
Essentially, Pinterest had shifted their algorithm to be much more focused on understanding search intent and topical authority, rather than simply looking at the keywords attached to an individual pin.
Previously, as long as a pin had a strong title, description and image it would be distributed fairly broadly across search and home feeds.
But it had now changed to prioritising pins that demonstrated topical authority at the account level – basically, if your account didn’t consistently create content around this specific topic as an expert, your pins wouldn’t be prioritised.
According to PinFreshly, the top three most important signals were now:
Account-level topic consistency – having a clear and consistent content focus rather than dozens of broad or unrelated topics
Pin-to-board relevance – saving pins to tightly themed, highly relevant boards rather than vague catch-all boards
Fresh content within your niche – consistently publishing new, original content within the topics your account is establishing authority around
In my head after reading this: “DING DING DING”.
To Pinterest, my account was a hot mess
From the beginning, I had built my Pinterest account to encompass all of my services and interests – reflecting me and the broad range of things I do and love.
One day I might be pinning a branding project. The next, a Squarespace website. Then an interior design mood board. Then a crochet pattern. Then top furniture picks. Then back to graphic design.
For a long time, this approach made sense to me because it represented my services, projects and creative interests. Looking back now? WHAT WAS I THINKING.
From Pinterest's perspective, they had no idea who I was trying to reach (apparently every person on the planet). Under an algorithm increasingly prioritising topical consistency, I'd inadvertently created an account with very little of it.
Now I knew exactly what I needed to do to bring my account back to life.
How I turned things around
1. I CHOSE WHAT I ACTUALLY WANTED PINTEREST TO KNOW ME FOR
First, I had to decide exactly what the focus or ‘niche’ my Pinterest account was going to be an expert on. Rather than treating my account as a home for every creative thing I do, it needed to have a much clearer purpose.
For me, that meant focusing predominantly on my branding, graphic design and website design services – topics that are closely related, appeal to similar audiences and fit neatly together.
I removed Interior design content from my strategy, while my crochet content moved to an entirely separate Pinterest account specifically focused on this.
2. I CLEANED UP MY BOARDS
Next came a Pinterest spring clean.
I went through my existing boards and removed or hid the ones that were no longer relevant to the topics I wanted the account to be known for, and created new, more focused boards where necessary.
I also renamed existing boards to make their subject matter much clearer and more descriptive.
Instead of trying to create boards that could accommodate anything, I wanted each one to have an obvious purpose and make it as easy as possible for Pinterest to understand exactly what each board – and ultimately my entire account – was about.
3. I DOUBLED DOWN ON POSTING FRESH, CONSISTENT PINS
Finally, I increased my posting and consistency.
I had previously averaged around one pin per day, but I decided to build posting two fresh pins per day on my main account into my ongoing marketing workflow (I batch schedule them directly in Pinterest once a week).
I wanted to increase my output to help get my content in front of more eyeballs, whilst ensuring I could keep the quality high – so 2 pins per day felt manageable, and consistency helps set my account up for success.
The results came quicker than I expected
Because I know Pinterest is a long-game platform, I didn’t think I would magically start seeing results overnight. Initially, I was hopeful I would start seeing some results within the first 1-2 months.
But I was surprised how quickly things started to turn around.
Within around two weeks, my numbers stopped declining and started trending upwards again. And then they kept going.
Within less than 3 months since making these updates, my monthly impressions went from a low of 88k in May 2026, to 270k by the end of July (my highest ever!).
That's an increase of more than 200% from my low. Huge for this little Pinner.
What this taught me about Pinterest (and my wider strategy)
Probably the biggest lesson from this whole experience is that more content and more topics isn't necessarily better.
This algorithm shift made me realise that I shouldn’t be treating Pinterest like an inspiration board for everything I love – it's a visual search and discovery platform and the strategy needs to reflect that.
And compared to my experience on Instagram, it actually felt nice to be able to implement changes that had a direct impact on my stats, as opposed to being completely at the mercy of the algorithm.
If you've been having a similarly sad time with your Pinterest analytics this year, you're definitely not alone – and you can fix it!
I’d highly recommend you head over and read PinFreshly's full article on the 2026 Pinterest algorithm changes. It was the resource that finally made everything click for me and gave me a practical direction for turning my own account around.
My Pinterest account might have needed a little CPR, but thankfully, it's now looking very much alive again.
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