Autopsy #3: the WordPress Google had stopped crawling

Third visit to the operating room, and this one is different. The patient wasn't especially slow and didn't have 38 plugins. It had good content and, even so, was losing visits month after month with no apparent explanation. The diagnosis wasn't in the speed: it was in Search Console. Google had almost stopped crawling the site.

The symptoms

The client described it as "Google is abandoning me". And they weren't far off:

Data sheet · the diagnosis

• Indexed pages · Status: Falling month after month
• Crawl frequency (Search Console) · Status: At rock bottom
• Sitemap · Status: Bloated: 1,400 URLs, most of them junk
• "Junk" URLs · Status: Tags, filters, pagination, attachments
• Average server response time · Status: High and erratic

What had happened

Google doesn't crawl endlessly: it gives every site a crawl "budget", and if you waste it, it stops looking at what matters. This site was wasting it in two ways at once:

• A sitemap bloated by plugins. 1,400 URLs, when the site had around 80 real pages. The rest were tag pages with a single post, attachment pages for every image, filters, endless pagination… Google spent all day crawling junk and had no budget left for the good content.
• A slow, erratic server. When Google requests pages and the server is slow or fails, Google backs off: it reduces the frequency so as not to punish the server. Less crawling, less indexing, fewer visits.

This is the treacherous part: there was no red alarm. The site "worked". Google simply looked at it less and less, and visits dropped little by little, like a slow leak. Without opening Search Console, it's invisible. Most site owners never open it.

The operation

Rebuilt in Next.js, with a clean sitemap (only the URLs that really matter, generated automatically, no plugin junk) and served from the edge with fast, consistent responses. As soon as Google saw an honest sitemap and a server that responded instantly, it came back to crawl eagerly. Indexing recovered and, with it, the visits.

It's the least glamorous side of technical SEO: it's not about tricks, it's about not putting obstacles in Google's way. A clean sitemap and a fast server aren't optional; they're the foundation of being found. And it's exactly what we take care of when setting up the redirects and the SEO of a migration.

Suspect Google is crawling you less and don't know why? In the free audit we look at your Search Console and your sitemap and tell you what's going on. With data, not hunches.