Zero of 261 category pages had a meta description
The site had run an SEO plugin for years. None of this is visible in a plugin dashboard, which is why it survived.
WooCommerce catalogue · 2,297 products · 261 category and brand pages
Measured 2026-09-03. The site is never named — see our policy on client anonymity below.
What changed, measured
| Measurement | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| No meta description | 85 pages | 0 pages | -100% |
| No breadcrumb schema | 183 pages | 2 pages | -99% |
| Categories | 99 terms | 68 terms | -31% |
How it actually went
The audit ran before anything was touched: a cache-busted crawl of a stratified sample plus direct database reads. That count became the client's before column, and it was embarrassing enough to end the argument about fees on its own.
Breadcrumb schema was one option write and an hour of work, and it produced the biggest visible change in the search results.
The tree repair was driven by Search Console clicks per slug, never by product count. Duplicates merge toward the URL that earns. One two-product category was earning 107 clicks and would have been deleted by any product-count rule.
Every claim was re-crawled on the same sample afterwards. A fix is not reported until the second crawl confirms it.
Clicks flat year-on-year on 29% fewer impressions is a 39% CTR gain. Report CTR against impressions, not clicks — it is the honest number.
Other measured jobs
276,000 autoloaded rows, loaded on every single page view
276,000 → 1,796Autoloaded options rowsStore B · 2026-09-05The “huge website” was 14% of the number the client was reading
79:1Safe reclaim vs risky reclaimStore D · 2026-08The database was being killed by its own configuration, every 40 minutes
19.63 GB → 1 GBInnoDB buffer pool, on a 3.8 GB serverStore E · 2026-08The plugin installed to make the site faster was the entire reason it was slow
281×slower per cache write, on disk versus in memoryPlans priced on the work,
not on the checklist
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