I migrated a droplet from Singapore to Bangalore on the 12th. It hosts a site that was averaging ~ 15k page views per day, predominantly Indian traffic (banking recruitment guide). Since then, the traffic has been rising steadily and yesterday crossed an all-time high of 26k page views. (No other changes made to the site)

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

Server response rate seems to be very slow.

From India?