Wordpress Plugin created two permalinks - could this lead to ranking issues?

[frankiez]

Hello, all

So we use an agency to help out on some larger projects which I do not have time for.

We just launched our website and we are in somewhat of a rankings slump. Nothing too terrible, but noticeable drop in traffic and rankings.

As I was investigating this, I noticed that for some reason right after the website launch we were ranking for two different pages for the same page. One had / at the end, and the other did not.

Example: www.homepage.com/myfirstpage and www.homepage.com/myfirstpage/

I asked the agency the reasoning for this and they informed me that a wordpress plugin created this on accident and it shouldn't be an issue.

Here is a screen shot of our GSC below. The old one fell off over the weekend, and since then, some rankings are slowly starting to recover.



https://imgur.com/YvPdWkN

Just wondering, could this have caused the rankings and traffic slump -or could it be something else? I can't help but think since GSC is showing different rankings and clicks for the permalinks that they may have caused some confusion in the indexing and launch of the website.

I've never experienced something like this before, so I'd like to rule this out as soon as possible before moving on to other potential problem areas.