Reply To: Traffic dropped again after the update

Technically, technically, yeah, I’d be looking at the rendered HTML and logs before I’d blame “the update” too hard. I’ve had this exact annoying pattern where Search Console looks like it’s having a stroke, but the real issue was some dumb plugin/cache combo changing what Google was actually seeing. Not always a full-on noindex disaster either — sometimes it’s just canonicals, lazyload, or a weird JS/rendering thing making pages look different to bot vs browser. If you haven’t already, check a couple of your top pages in URL Inspection and compare the live test to what you expect. Also worth looking at whether Googlebot is still crawling the same URLs or if it’s suddenly favoring junk variants, parameters, or old cached paths. If logs are clean and the rendered HTML hasn’t changed, then yeah, it may just be one of those stupid wobble periods and not some self-inflicted disaster. But if there’s *any* output difference, I’d stop trusting the “same plugins, same site” line — WordPress always sneaks something in. In my opinion,