Our client's organic traffic dropped 70% in 30 days - here is what happened

We had a client in ecommerce making $12k a month from organic search. Then one Monday their traffic just fell off a cliff. I checked everything and the issue was a core web vitals update that hit their mobile pages hard. Their LCP went from 2.1 seconds to 8.4 seconds because a third party script was blocking render. We fixed it in two days but the damage was done. Has anyone else had a single metric like LCP kill your rankings that fast?

3 comments

3 Comments

charles_mitchell1mo ago

Does that mean we're all just one bad plugin away from losing everything?

karen_sanchez491mo ago

Used to think people overreacted about core web vitals. Then a similar thing happened to a site I was working on. Their LCP jumped from 2.5 to 7 seconds after a third party tracking script loaded wrong. Rankings for their main terms dropped 60% in less than two weeks. Fixed it and traffic came back slowly but it took almost three months to get back to where it was.

grays131mo ago

Drove me crazy reading anyone blaming core web vitals for anything at first. I was in the camp that thought it was just Google trying to sell something. Then we had a client who was losing traffic left and right and had no idea why. Spent weeks looking at content, backlinks, everything. Finally checked their largest contentful paint and it was a total disaster because of some bloated carousel plugin they insisted on. As soon as we stripped that out and optimized a couple hero images, the speed went back to normal and their rankings slowly started to creep back. Your story with the tracking script matches what we saw almost exactly. It is wild how one bad script can undo months of SEO work overnight.