Since the site migration on March 9, we've been losing organic traffic and leads. In the last 5 days (Apr 12–17) it accelerated. After diagnosing via GA4, Google Search Console, and Ahrefs, here's the picture:
iambarabbas.github.io instead of truelegacyhomes.com. Google is overriding this, but it's sending conflicting signals.Everything below is organized as: the issue, the evidence from Google's own tools, and the specific fix.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| Mar 9, 2026 | Site migrated to static GitHub Pages deploy (iambarabbas.github.io) proxied through Cloudflare. URL structure changed (/hummel-figurines/ → /blog/hummel-figurines). |
| Mar 9 – Apr 9 | Organic sessions -57% daily avg; organic conversions -97%; total form submissions -61%. |
| Apr 10 – Apr 12 | Brief recovery peak — Apr 12 hit 336 GSC clicks (highest post-migration). |
| Apr 12 → Apr 15 | Mobile organic clicks dropped 52% (252 → 120). Mobile impressions dropped 38%. Desktop held relatively flat. |
| Apr 13 – Apr 17 | Paid search sessions collapsed from 91 to 12/day (-87%). Lead volume tanked. |
| Apr 17 (today) | Google crawled sitemap.xml at 09:22 UTC — 125 URLs submitted, still 0 indexed. |
Data from Google Search Console broken out by device, last 2 weeks:
| Date | Mobile Clicks | Mobile Impr. | Mobile Position | Desktop Clicks | Desktop Position |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 10 | 203 | 9,671 | 5.32 | 72 | 8.09 |
| Apr 11 | 250 | 12,283 | 4.92 | 60 | 8.08 |
| Apr 12 (peak) | 252 | 12,268 | 4.89 | 69 | 8.45 |
| Apr 13 | 189 | 9,163 | 4.90 | 59 | 9.64 |
| Apr 14 | 145 | 8,670 | 4.65 | 67 | 10.46 |
| Apr 15 | 120 | 7,577 | 5.37 | 52 | 10.87 |
Mobile positions actually improved slightly on Apr 14 (4.89 → 4.65). Yet mobile clicks dropped 52% and impressions dropped 38%. Translation: Google is showing our pages to fewer mobile searchers — not ranking them worse. This is an exposure/visibility cut, not a ranking drop.
This pattern almost always points to one of two things:
Since Google prioritizes mobile-first indexing, mobile issues hit the entire index — including what shows up on desktop search, paid ads, and everywhere else.
Every indexed blog page on the site declares its canonical URL as the raw GitHub Pages origin instead of the production domain.
https://www.truelegacyhomes.com/blog/hummel-figurineshttps://iambarabbas.github.io/blog/hummel-figurines.htmlhttps://www.truelegacyhomes.com/blog/hummel-figurines (Google is overriding, but this is unreliable)
<link rel="canonical" href="https://iambarabbas.github.io/blog/{slug}.html"><link rel="canonical" href="https://www.truelegacyhomes.com/blog/{slug}">site.url in Jekyll's _config.yml) and/or the canonical tag template.
The new sitemap at truelegacyhomes.com/sitemap.xml has 125 URLs submitted. Google crawls it regularly (last crawl: April 17, 2026 at 09:22 UTC). Zero URLs have been indexed.
https://truelegacyhomes.com/sitemap.xmlwww.truelegacyhomes.com/sitemap_index.xml): 1 error, 2 warnings, last downloaded March 9.
https://www.truelegacyhomes.com/blog/..., not the GitHub origin).www.truelegacyhomes.com/sitemap_index.xml — resolve the 1 error and 2 warnings, or remove it entirely from GSC.The mobile-specific click collapse (-52% in 3 days) with positions improving suggests Google downgraded the site's mobile quality score. This is the most likely immediate cause of the current traffic bleed.
https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis?url=https://www.truelegacyhomes.com/…/blog/hummel-figurines…/blog/age-glass-bottles…/blog/royal-doulton-figurineshttps://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendlytruelegacyhomes.com on a real phone. Look for: text too small to read, tap targets too close, content wider than screen, broken layout, slow load.<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">Ahrefs site audit found 148 URLs returning error codes. Google wastes crawl budget on these and sees them as quality signals hurting the whole domain.
Broken <img> tags across the site degrade mobile UX and feed directly into Google's quality score for the pages. Very likely contributing to the mobile score drop.
<img> tag. If a batch fix is possible (e.g., images all live in /assets/images/ and the prefix is wrong), a single find/replace in the build could clear most of them.
Separate from issue #1 — 158 pages declare canonicals that themselves redirect somewhere else. Double-redirect confusion for Google.
Internal links across the site point to old URLs that redirect. This dilutes link equity and slows Google's crawl.
/hummel-figurines/ links should be updated to /blog/hummel-figurines directly.
Organic conversions dropped 97% post-migration (from ~2/day to ~0.06/day). Form submission events in GA4 are still firing at ~10–20/day, suggesting the events themselves work but conversion marking or attribution broke.
form_submit: ~10–20/day (working)form_submit (and Schedule Consult Form Submission) are marked as Key Events/Conversions. Verify the GA4 measurement ID is identical on the new site vs. what GA4 expects. Confirm events include proper page_location (mobile and desktop) and that there's no domain mismatch breaking attribution.
"Direct" channel sessions more than doubled post-migration (10K → 27K), but with a 96% bounce rate and almost no conversions. Very likely bot traffic hitting the static origin, or a referrer-stripping issue on the Cloudflare proxy.
Referer header so GA4 can attribute sessions correctly.
In priority order — these are the concrete things needed from you:
<meta name="viewport"> is present in the base templatehttps://www.truelegacyhomes.com/ (not iambarabbas.github.io)sitemap_index.xml, or remove it from GSC<head>:<script src="https://analytics.ahrefs.com/analytics.js" data-key="ZnPLvtc/3QdsII1NHSnmkA" async></script>
Context so you understand the urgency:
| Metric | Pre-Migration (Jan 1 – Mar 8) | Post-Migration (Mar 9 – Apr 9) | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Organic sessions/day | 478 | 207 | -57% |
| Organic conversions/day | 2.04 | 0.06 | -97% |
| Organic form submissions/day | 2.3 | 0.6 | -75% |
| Total form submissions/day | 13.5 | 5.3 | -61% |
| Bounce rate (organic) | 31.9% | 56.9% | +78% relative |
| Ahrefs Health Score | — | 45/100 | trending down |
And the current (Apr 15–17) acceleration:
sc-domain:truelegacyhomes.com335549274)Brett — my ask:
Happy to hop on a call whenever works. The lead volume impact is severe enough that this needs to move fast.
— Justin