Reply To: Traffic tanked after a plugin update?

[Pike]

Honestly, yeah, I wouldn’t brush that off. I’ve had a cache plugin update straight-up serve busted HTML to bots while everything looked fine to me in Chrome. No obvious “site is broken” moment, just a slow bleed in impressions and then traffic. SEO plugin updates can be just as annoying if they tweak canonicals, robots, sitemap output, whatever. If it lined up that cleanly with the update, I’d be checking: – page source on a few money pages – sitemap status in GSC – any noindex/canonical changes – cached version vs live version – whether the plugin flipped some setting on you Could still be Google being Google, sure, but the timing’s too neat to ignore. Mason’s kinda right for once on the general idea, but I’d still verify the plugin stuff before assuming it’s just a shuffle.