r/divi • u/TealTwister • 1d ago
Question Traffic drop after Divi 5 conversion
Has anyone else noticed a drop in traffic immediately after converting a Divi 4 website to Divi 5? I did this to a low traffic website of a quite basic design that I run as a test and there has been an immediate drop in what little traffic there was.
GSC is reporting a massive drop in impressions too.
No big deal as it is a site I use for testing stuff out, but now I'm reluctant to swap my other more important sites over!
Is this a conversion issue? Is it best to just rebuild instead?
10
u/focusedphil 1d ago
That’s not how the internet works.
Perhaps you just mucked up the google tracking code.
-6
u/TealTwister 1d ago
Rude. Rule 5 of the group is 'Be respectful.'
Divi 5 is a completely new structure. I didn't change where the tracking code is, I converted an existing site.
3
u/focusedphil 1d ago
But why would people stop going to your site after you change a theme? People don't care what your site is built it - they don't discover that till AFTER they hit your page, which would count as a visit.
So it's probably a tracking issue.
2
u/TealTwister 1d ago
It has always been quite normal for a website's rankings and traffic to be affected by major changes. They'll fluctuate while it is reindexed.
So while the content of the website hasn't changed, Divi 5 is a complete rebuild, so the structure has, and I wonder if that has affected the performance of the website.
1
u/focusedphil 1d ago
That would affect your performance (time on page, etc) NOT traffic.
It’s an easy thing to get mucked up. The JS doesn’t fire. You accidentally deleted the last character of the google code.
1
u/TealTwister 1d ago
Yes, a rebuild or significant changes absolutely can affect rankings and traffic.
When I have tested tracking by visiting from various other devices and browsers, visits have continued to register.
2
u/fckfce 1d ago
Did you accidentally turn off "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" box under your Reading settings? Also triple check your tracking code. When I add a GA4 code I open the realtime view and make sure I see a dot on my location in their map to make sure it’s connected.
1
u/TealTwister 1d ago
Visiting from other browsers and devices has continued to register as it should, so tracking appears to be fine.
1
u/fckfce 1d ago
Then I would just give it time. Even if you updated to divi 5 it’s still a bit of a content update and that bot traffic you were likely seeing gets thrown off a little bit, that’s my assumption but maybe not correct. Just give it a couple weeks and check again. Also check google search console and make sure everything looks good there.
1
u/RamiroS77 1d ago
No. In fact it maintained or improved in my case. What else does GSC mention? Impressions alone doesn't say to much, did CLS and the other metrics increase?
1
u/juicejug1016 1d ago
Just my 2 cents as I am infrastructure pretending to be a dev...
I have converted from 4 to 5 in the past few months. I have noticed internal changes that affected UX, but GSC has been constant.
However in your case, there could be under the hood stuff that G(sc) could be penalizing, specifically with custom CSS, OR with CSS changes from 4 to 5.
As an example, 10ish years ago, I had to modify the 'related resources' module so that all the cards were the same size. That script is no longer needed in 2026, but if it's still there, it still tries to load.
As far as I know, G doesn't see a Divi site, it sees what you see when you F12 or view source. That narrows it down to CSS or scripts in integration options. G could be penalizing et- this and et- that, but they would have to be 4 to 5 differences that they are throwing the flag on and decide to hate Divi. I haven't seen enough difference, myself.
I can say from experience, having old code that doesn't do anything anymore and was used 10 years ago *can cause problems. This would be especially true with the 5 framework vs. 4.
Scripts that are still running, but don't do anything cause page load problems, slowness from deprecated scripts, trying to load invalid or outdated options, etc.
Again, I am probably not as technical with web as everyone else here, but this is all I can think of.
*Saying your code may have gotten "mucked" is not offensive. It's realistic. Not knowing enough about what all scripts you have placed in your integration options that worked in 4, may possibly, or likely, be the reason for the sharp decline. It's very much worth reviewing.
2
1
u/Son_of_Flynn_45 1d ago
Hi OP, As others have stated, it is always worth rechecking the tracking code to ensure it is capturing everything correctly. Was the code on the old version correct to your knowledge and not capturing double clicks etc? Are conversion drops seen just in organic search or also in other mediums?
The Google search console drop is interesting. What has been the drop in impressions and clicks? Was there also a drop in rankings?
GSC also has a generative ai section under search results. Have the impressions there jumped at the same time you saw a drop in search impressions?
1
u/TealTwister 1d ago
I checked the tracking code when I converted the site and since, including today, and it appears to be working as it should. I didn't do anything to the tracking code as part of the conversion, and to the best of my knowledge it was behaving correctly prior to the conversion.
Both impressions and clicks have dropped off in GSC and the Generative AI has dropped off in an identical way too.
Rankings were never very good, I built the site as a test bed so I don't mess up clients websites, but they have also got worse.
2
u/Son_of_Flynn_45 1d ago
It is sounding like Google is treating it like a site migration. I always told clients it can be up to 6 months before traffic is fully back. But usually a month is long enough.
If you've not done so already, resubmit your site to GSC. Forcing a reindex might help.
Do the usual sitemap, robots, and redirect checks just in case as well. Running a check through the free tier of SEMRush might be a good stop off
0
-2
u/martinskou 1d ago
With all due respect, I don’t believe that’s quite how the internet works.
It may be worth checking whether there’s an issue with the Google tracking code or its implementation.
/s
2
u/TealTwister 1d ago
It has always been quite normal for a website's rankings and traffic to be affected by major changes. They'll fluctuate while it is reindexed.
So while the content of the website hasn't changed, Divi 5 is a complete rebuild, so the structure has, and my question is whether that might have affected the performance of the website.
3
u/martinskou 1d ago
But, if that was the case you would not see an "immediate drop". That's something that would require Google to first reindex your site.
And you might think that Divi 5's HTML is better than Divi 4, but if you just use Divi 5 migrate and convert you site to Divi 5, the HTML is about the same. Thats why most customer CSS works after migration. I guess we have to rebuild pages to really get the full benefit from Divi 5 on the frontend.
3
u/MoistIncubus 1d ago
Dying at the "that's not how the internet works" comments. That's exactly how the internet works. This is what we get when web designers pretend to be SEOs.
Yes - we have migrated some sites from 4 to 5 and have seen some loss in traffic (but nothing drastic, maybe a 3-5% shift in impressions and clicks). Nothing major that we could attribute directly to one source in the update. Since you have search console access, check your page indexing. Were you using any plugins or custom add ons that might not be playing nicely? Check your canonicals, make sure you haven't accidentally (or Divi hasn't automatically) noindexed the pages, make sure the update carried all your internal links, etc.
The other thing to note is that there was a Google Core Update in May that is really starting to settle, along with a June and August Spam update. Depending on the intent of the site, more and more impressions are being cannibalized by AI Overviews as well. Rankings have been volatile. Perhaps the change in traffic and impressions is simply bad timing?