Traffic tanked after plugin update

[Nathan]

Not sure if this is just me, but one of my sites got wrecked right after updating a caching plugin yesterday. Pages are loading weird in Chrome, Search Console started showing crawl issues, and rankings dipped hard overnight. I rolled it back and things look a bit better, but now I’m wondering if it was the plugin or just bad timing with Google doing its usual nonsense. Anyone else seeing this kind of mess lately?

[pixelwitch]

Yeah, I’d be suspicious of the plugin first, honestly. I’ve had caching/minify stuff break pages in Chrome before and it gets ugly fast — weird rendering, crawl weirdness, then GSC starts acting like the site’s haunted. Rolling it back and seeing some recovery is a pretty loud clue. Google can absolutely be doing its usual garbage at the same time though, so it might be a combo. But if the timing was right after the update, I wouldn’t ignore that.

[hankroot]

Realistically, yeah, I’d lean plugin too, at least as the trigger. Had a caching/minify update do almost exactly this on a client site last year — Chrome looked busted, GSC started throwing crawl junk, and traffic fell off a cliff for a couple days. Rolled it back and it didn’t magically fix everything, but enough came back that it was pretty obvious something in the output got messed up. I’d check: – rendered HTML vs source – whether it’s serving stale cached junk – any JS/CSS being deferred or combined wrong – canonicals / noindex / robots weirdness after the update Google being Google can muddy it, sure, but “right after plugin update” is usually not a coincidence. pixelwitch is kinda right for once, annoyingly. Personally,

[Den]

Yeah, I’d still treat the plugin as the main suspect here. If rollback helped even a bit, that’s usually not “random Google nonsense” in my experience. I’d keep an eye on what it changed in the rendered output, because caching/minify stuff loves…

[crawl_void]

Yeah, plugin first. “Google did it” is usually the lazy answer people jump to when something breaks right after a deploy. If Chrome is rendering weird and GSC started throwing crawl issues after the update, that smells like output changes, not some mysterious ranking fairy. I’d check the rendered HTML and headers, not just the source. Caching/minify plugins love breaking stuff in ways that look random until you diff the page before/after. Rollback helping even a bit is the part that… In my opinion,

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