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What could explain the increase in traffic? Higher visitor retention due to improved page load performance?

does Google take server location into account when showing search results? edit: seems they might. This is a probable cause for the increase in your traffic

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en

Yes, I have experienced this several times before.

You can check my comments on this recent thread for a somewhat more detailed account of my observations:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11984673

Reply on news.ycombinator.com