A business relaunched its website and waited for the search traffic to return. Six weeks later it had not. The old site had ranked reasonably; the new one appeared nowhere at all, not even for its own company name.
One checkbox. During the build, WordPress had been set to discourage search engines from indexing the site, which is correct while a site is being built and catastrophic once it is live. Nobody unticked it at launch.
Why nobody noticed
The site worked perfectly. Every page loaded, the forms sent, the design was right. Nothing about it looked wrong, because nothing about it was wrong except one setting nobody had reason to look at after launch day.
Search traffic also does not vanish instantly. It decays over a few weeks as pages drop out of the index, which is slow enough to be mistaken for a quiet patch.
The fix, and the better fix
Unticking the box took seconds. Recovery took closer to a month, because pages have to be recrawled and reassessed rather than simply switched back on. That asymmetry is the expensive part: a two-second mistake cost six weeks of enquiries.
The better fix was a short launch checklist, run on the day a site goes live rather than remembered afterwards. Indexing on, analytics connected, a sitemap submitted, a test through every form.
Worth doing today
Search Google for your exact business name. If your own site is not the first result, something is wrong and it is worth finding out what.
Then check the setting directly: in WordPress it lives under Settings, then Reading, as a single line about discouraging search engines. It should be unticked on any live site.
If traffic has fallen and this is not the cause, the other likely explanation is that search itself has changed rather than your site: answers now appear above the results and absorb the click. The two look the same in a dashboard and have completely different answers.
If your site has gone quiet since a rebuild, describe what changed and when. This category of problem is usually identified in minutes.