Reply To: Traffic tanked after a plugin update?

Usually, yeah, I’d still put the plugin update near the top of the list. I’ve had cache plugins do some dumb stuff where the site *looked* fine, but Google was clearly seeing different output, or the sitemap/canonical stuff got weird after an update. SEO plugins can be just as annoying if they quietly flip a setting or start outputting junk. If impressions dropped too, that makes me less interested in the “just a normal Google shuffle” excuse. That usually doesn’t line up that neatly with a plugin update.