Reply To: Traffic dropped after adding new plugin?

[Den]

In my opinion, To be fair, yeah, I’d treat it as plugin-related until proven otherwise. I’ve had stuff like that happen where the plugin didn’t “break SEO” in some dramatic way, it just changed enough on the page that Google started crawling it differently. Canonicals, noindex tags, weird extra wrappers, lazy-loaded links, all that junk. Affiliate pages seem to get hit by that kind of nonsense pretty fast. I’d check the rendered HTML first, not just the source. If Search Console is showing indexing oddities, look at the affected URLs one by one and compare before/after if you can. Also worth disabling the plugin on a test copy if you’ve got one, because guessing in the dark usually wastes a day or two. If it’s only a small drop for now, I wouldn’t panic yet. But I also wouldn’t assume “Google being…