[Support request] My Sites Lost Traffic a Day After I changed to GeneratePress

[Olalekan]

On the 6th of June, I decided to switch from Astra Pro to Generatepress since I have GP Premium lifetime license. I had delayed this move for over a year for fear of some unforeseen issues, and now my fear has birthed this reality:

7th of June, the two sites started losing traffic, and I watched for a month, but nothing changed. I switched one of the sites’s theme back from Generatepress to Astra and the following day, the traffic started climbing up.

To talk about the loss, the site was doing an average of 25,000 clicks per day, and after the switch, it began to do n average of 18,000 per day; that’s like 30% of traffic and earnings lost in a month.

I submitted sitemap when I did the theme change on the 6th of June, and I checked everything I knew could go wrong, but nothing changed.

I will wait a few more days to switch back to Astra Pro on the other website (this one also lost around 30% in traffic: from an average of 20,000 clicks per day to an average of 14,000.)

But would like to know if anyone has had the same experience before, and what advice is best for a time like this?

Screeenshot of the Site Before and After Theme Change

[Olalekan]

Screeenshot of the Site Before and After Theme Change

[David]

Hi there,

when switching themes, was there any noticeable changes made to the design of the site ? Such as the display of post meta or the use of any specific schemas ?

[Olalekan]

I changed the theme, uploaded the child theme and used the same. Inserted a function in the child theme to get rid of the #more-xxx in the read more button.

Or could it be the button colour that changed to gradient? I doubt.

– I resubmitted sitemaps, saved permalink, cleared cache and did all sort, but nothing changed.

I haven’t changed the theme back for the other site, and the traffic is still dropping. If you would like to have a look, I have provided login details.

[David]

If your Right Click > Inspect your site to open the Browser Developers tools, and click on the Console tab, you will see a bunch of errors. They all look related to advert and analytics scripts.

None of these are related to the theme, and i cannot say if they are related to the issue you’re experiencing but its lot of broken scripts and that should be fixed.

I would recommend disabling any cache/optimization plugins. And check any advert and analytics scripts have been added correctly. And then recheck the Browser developers console.

[Olalekan]

Thanks for the inspection, David.

I just had to switch back to Astra Pro and would love you help with the inspection to know if the errors you saw are there not. Thanks.

[David]

I see 2-3 errors that are the same.
I don’t see the large amount of ad related errors now – instead i see a lot of AMP related errors on the single post.

Did you have AMP setup on the GP Site ?

[Olalekan]

So I changed from GeneratePress to Astra Pro, and then some of the errors were gone?
Doesn’t that point to a bug or something with Generate Press?

Regarding AMP, I actually do not have it on the site. Thanks.

[David]

Some errors were gone and in there place there were a lot of other errors.
They are not Theme related.

Every error was related to a 3rd party script whether that be analytics, adverts, AMP ( on Astra only ? ) or some other 3rd party service.

All of which GeneratePress has no knowledge of, even if you used a GeneratePress Hook or a function that uses GP hooks to insert them, the Theme is simply providing you a space in the code. We also don’t run any code that would interefere with them.

And the errors were things like 403 Forbidden errors, which means a script made a request to a server that did not allow access.

2 errors which are also on the Astra site was:

Failed to preconnect to https://eechicha.com/. Error: The certificate for this server is invalid. You might be connecting to a server that is pretending to be “eechicha.com”, which could put your confidential information at risk

and many instances of these:

Blocked a frame with origin "https://motivationandlove.com" from accessing a frame with origin "https://googleads.g.doubleclick.net". Protocols, domains, and ports must match.

I also checked the site with Astra on to see if it is adding any additional schema or meta data that may have helped with ranking. But i cannot see any, aside from that which RankMath is adding.

[Author]

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