Understanding Sudden Traffic and Ranking Drops in Multilingual WordPress Sites: A Case Study
Introduction
Experiencing a sudden drop in website traffic, impressions, and search rankings can be alarming, especially after months or years of steady growth. For website owners managing multilingual content with tools like Polylang, such issues may be linked to technical configurations related to language switching, hreflang tags, or indexing behaviors. In this article, we explore a real-world case study of a WordPress site that faced a drastic overnight decline in visibility, analyze potential causes, and discuss effective troubleshooting strategies.
Background
The website in question was established two years prior, featuring an initial collection of approximately 30 articles. Over time, the site gained traction, ranking for numerous keywords, with steady traffic growth observed over six months, facilitated by regular content updates and additions.
Originally, the site operated bilingually (Polylang), supporting two languages. Around six months ago, a third language was introduced, with about half of the articles translated manually—not via automatic translation tools. Recent developments involved adding a fourth language (Russian), initially with only the homepage translated and one article created in that language.
The Issue
Approximately ten days ago, the site experienced a complete traffic collapse: organic impressions plummeted from around 5,000 daily to zero. This decline was reflected in tools like Google Search Console, which showed no visible errors suggesting a penalty or manual action. Despite this drop, a site search (using site:domain.com) revealed that all articles remained indexed and accessible.
Initial suspicions centered around potential technical issues arising from recent changes, particularly related to multilingual configuration and hreflang implementation.
Potential Cause: Misconfigured Language Switcher and hreflang Tags
One identified factor was the behavior of the Polylang language switcher embedded in the site’s menus. After adding the fourth language (Russian), the switcher displayed all languages in every menu, including Russian. Crucially, since the “Hide languages with no translation” option was not enabled, the switcher presented links to Russian versions of articles—even when those translations did not exist.
This resulted in numerous URLs (approximately 105 if considering 35 articles across 3 languages) pointing to Russian homepage URLs for articles not translated into Russian. When users clicked these links, they were directed to the Russian homepage instead of the corresponding article in Russian—potentially causing confusing user signals and conflicting hreflang annotations.
Could this misconfiguration have caused Google