Drafted WordPress content can affect SEO. While an unpublished post cannot be crawled and indexed, drafted content can affect your site speed. Changing an already published piece of content to a draft can also cause Google to remove it from its index.
Drafted posts take up very little space on your website; however, a large number of drafted, unpublished WordPress posts can affect site speed, which would, in turn, affect how Google’s Core Web Vitals algorithm evaluates your website.
If you have a piece of content that’s ranking well, but there are changes and updates that you need to make to it, unpublishing that content until it has been updated can cause it to lose all rankings. Even if you unpublished the content for just a brief period of time, there’s a posed risk that Googlebot will visit your website during that time and consider the missing content as permanently deleted.
It’s best to keep the old version of the page published while you’re preparing the updates in the background.
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