Reply To: Traffic tanked after latest update, anyone else?

[axelrowan]

From my experience, yeah, I’d be a lot more suspicious of Google than Yoast here. If it was a plugin or cache issue, I’d expect weirder symptoms than “steady for months, then a clean drop after an update.” Usually you get crap like pages deindexing, canonicals going sideways, stale cache serving old titles, or crawl errors popping up in GSC. Not saying WordPress can’t screw itself, because it absolutely can, but this smells more like ranking churn. I’d check whether the drop is sitewide or just a chunk of pages first. Also impressions vs clicks matters a lot here — if impressions fell off a cliff too, that’s not just snippets getting uglier. If impressions are still there and clicks tanked, then yeah, SERP layout / snippet / intent shift could be part of it. Cheap hosting is worth keeping in the back of your mind, but I wouldn’t start tearing the site apart over that unless you’re seeing crawl delays, server errors, or render issues. Google’s been doing that annoying “your page was fine yesterday, now it’s somewhere in the basement” thing a lot lately. Could be wrong though.