Reply To: Traffic tanked after a plugin update?

[axelrowan]

Realistically, yeah, I’d be looking at the plugin change first too. Cache plugins especially can do that annoying thing where the browser looks fine but Googlebot is getting some busted variation of the page, or stale headers, or weirdly cached canonicals. SEO plugins are just as guilty when they “update” settings you didn’t ask them to touch. I’ve seen sitemap URLs get flipped, noindex get applied to stuff that shouldn’t be, even canonical tags changed sitewide after an update. If impressions dropped with clicks, that’s the part that makes me think it’s not just normal volatility. A CTR wobble doesn’t usually hit impressions that hard unless something changed in how Google is seeing the pages. I’d roll back one plugin at a time if you can, not both at once. And check the raw source, not the rendered page in your browser — that’s where these things usually show up.