Images have gone missing from Google’s search results pages again, with recipe bloggers appearing to be the most affected. Some speculate that WP Rocket might be the cause, but this has not been confirmed.
The sites featured in carousels at the top of the page lost their rankings, while those in the regular search results retained their rankings but lost their accompanying images.
Casey Markee tweeted that he received multiple reports from sites whose “recipe carousel” listings had disappeared. Many recipe bloggers responded to his tweet, sharing that their listings in top-ranking positions had also vanished.
There is a suspicion that WP Rocket, a plugin designed to speed up sites by caching and minifying files, might be causing the images to not be visible to Google. The process of caching or minifying can sometimes interfere with a plugin, causing issues with site functionality. It is advised to flush and recreate the cache when any plugin or WordPress itself updates, although caching plugins don’t always do this automatically.
Jeff Hawley also noted that while WP Rocket was suspected, not every blogger experiencing issues was using it. WP Rocket had an update on June 24, 2020, which might have introduced conflicts with other plugins or WordPress itself.
Reports linked WP Rocket’s recent update to the image disappearance issues, suggesting it might be blocking CSS or JavaScript files, thereby preventing Google from accessing all the web page images and resources. Casey Markee demonstrated how disabling WP Rocket restored the visibility of structured data for Google’s Rich Snippets tool.
Interestingly, WP Rocket released another update on July 8, 2020, and some bloggers reported that updating to this latest version resolved their issues. WP Rocket also reached out on Twitter to offer support.
According to Casey Markee, multiple plugin conflicts were causing the temporary rendering issues. One significant culprit identified was Grow by Mediavine, alongside WP Rocket in certain cases.
Although Google’s John Mueller requested URLs from bloggers experiencing issues, it remains uncertain if this specific problem has been fully addressed.
By July 8, 2020, it was clear that the issue wasn’t solely due to WP Rocket. The plugin, Grow by MediaVine, was also identified as a source of the image problems, underscoring that the most obvious suspect isn’t always at fault. This illustrates the importance of thorough diagnosis when addressing complex technical problems.
