Reply To: Traffic tanked after a plugin update?

Well, personally, interesting take. Yeah, I’d be looking at the plugins first too, not Google’s latest magic trick. Cache plugins in particular love doing that thing where everything *looks* normal to you, but Googlebot’s getting some busted cached version, weird headers, stale canonicals, whatever. SEO plugins can screw you just as fast if an update quietly flips noindex/canonical/sitemap stuff. Seen that nonsense before. If impressions dropped too, that’s what makes me less inclined to call it “just volatility.” CTR can wobble all day, but impressions falling right after a plugin update is a bit too convenient. I’d probably: – check page source, not just the rendered page – look at sitemap output – inspect a couple URLs in GSC – compare before/after canonicals and meta robots – if possible, roll back one plugin at a time And yeah, if the cache plugin and SEO plugin updated around the same time, that’s basically asking for a headache. Google can be flaky, sure, but plugins breaking crawl output is way more common than people want to admit.