Health-testing store: recovering after the SEO plugin went dark

On a WooCommerce store that sells health tests, someone switched off the SEO plugin for a short time. Afterward, indexed pages, organic visits, and referrals from AI assistants all dropped. The owner isn't technical and needed the problem found, fixed, and the recovery demonstrated.

The engagement

Three paid milestones: diagnosis, fixes, and verification. Because the store handles protected health information, the work ran under a HIPAA agreement and an NDA.

Why a few hours matter

On WordPress, the SEO plugin quietly produces titles, descriptions, canonicals, robots directives, structured data, and the XML sitemaps. With it off, crawlers that visit see pages with no canonicals, default titles, and sitemaps that have vanished. Switching it back on doesn't erase what search engines recorded while it was off; they have to recrawl and reconsider.

The work

• URL Inspection on the priority product and information pages.
• Crawl stats reviewed for changes in Googlebot's visit rate and what it fetched.
• Sitemaps checked and resubmitted to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
• A watch list of priority pages for the recovery period.
• Structured data, Cloudflare settings, and ghost traffic in GA4 reviewed in the same scope.

Proving recovery

I tracked several indicators over time rather than trusting one dashboard, and took care to tell a stale report apart from a fault that was still active. Each milestone closed with a plain-language note for the owner, showing the before and after side by side.

Status

Recovery checks continue, with redirects, merchant structured data, and crawler policy as possible next steps. Related: WordPress SEO and Search Console setup.

Updated October 6, 2026