Most sites do not decline because of an update. They decline because nobody noticed a template change dropped the canonical tag, or that a plugin started adding noindex, or that half the internal links now point through a redirect chain.
A workable cadence
- Weekly: Search Console coverage and manual actions; uptime.
- Monthly: crawl the site, compare against the previous crawl, review new 404s and redirect chains.
- Quarterly: content review, what has decayed, what needs updating or merging.
- On every release: check robots.txt, canonical tags, meta robots and sitemap output on staging before deploy.
Alien Road recommends: put the pre-deploy check into your release checklist rather than your calendar. Calendar tasks get skipped under deadline pressure; release checklists do not. The three lines that matter, robots.txt, meta robots, canonical, take under a minute to verify and have saved sites we work on from week-long outages in Search.