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What is wrong with my website?
Posted by on April 9, 2026 at 4:48 amI am looking for second set of eyes on this traffic drop issue. There's a ~62% drop in organic and ~50% in total traffic. A bit of history; rankings and traffic was pretty good in january but after migrating to vercel and accidentally removing the sitemap file, we saw a sudden drop.
now, this happened months ago and even after fixing everything, there is still no sign of recovery. Clicks and impressions are dropping every week. As far as I know, there are no technical issues, speed is decent, we are working on revamping old blogs but still I don't see what is the main issue here.
There are some issues that I am not able to catch which is causing this and I'd appreciate any insights or guidelines.
website – middleware(dot)io
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1 Reply
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Sitemap removal prob wasn’t the real cause by itself. Bigger red flag imo is the blog archive literally outputting ‘Oops! It’s empty like space. No data available’ on the page before the posts.
That feels way more like a migration / template / render issue than just ‘content got stale’. I’d check rendered HTML, canonicals, indexation, internal links, and 301s for the old blog URLs before doing more content work.
A sharp Jan drop and then a slow bleed after usually means Google is still seeing broken signals somewhere.
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You have backlinks but I’m not impressed with your anchor text
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[removed]
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A 60% drop right after a migration + sitemap removal usually isn’t just the sitemap, it’s a signal something bigger changed in how Google sees the site.
A few things I’d double check based on similar cases I’ve seen:
* URL structure: did anything at all change with paths, trailing slashes, casing, or parameters? Even small differences can break equity if redirects aren’t perfect.
* Redirects: make sure every old URL is 301 → exact matching new URL, not just homepage or loose matches.
* Indexing: are your key pages actually indexed right now, or slowly falling out? GSC coverage report usually tells the story.
* Internal linking: migrations sometimes mess this up, especially if components changed. Orphaned pages = slow death.
* Vercel setup: seen cases where headers, canonicals, or even accidental noindex tags sneak in depending on env configs.Also, the fact it keeps declining weekly makes me think Google still doesn’t fully trust the current version of the site, not just a one-time hit. That’s usually either redirect gaps or content/structure changes that altered relevance.
If you haven’t yet, I’d crawl the *old version vs current* and compare. That diff often exposes what quietly broke.
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1. Sitemap removal is never an issue.
2. Look into Google Search Console. It’ll give you a clearer picture of what’s happening.
3. Move to Vercel could be an issue. When you say no technical issues; what did you check?
4. Website speed is never an issue – unless each page takes >5-10 seconds to load.
5. Is the drop uniform across all the content or specific parts?
6. Did you alter any URLs during the migration process?
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