WordPress SEO
SEO for WordPress sites, without guesswork
WordPress makes publishing easy, and makes it easy to pick up SEO problems along the way. Find out what your themes, plugins and settings are doing to your visibility.
The problem
Sound familiar?
Settings that quietly block Google
A forgotten "Discourage search engines" box or a noindex setting in a plugin can hide your whole site.
Plugin and theme bloat
Too many plugins and heavy page builders slow pages down on mobile.
Thin archive pages
Tag, category, author and date archives can create lots of low-value pages.
What it costs
Why it's worth fixing
- Important pages left out of the index or crawled less often
- Slow pages that frustrate mobile visitors
- Duplicate or conflicting metadata and schema from overlapping plugins
The solution
Tools built for this
SEO Audit & Action Plan
Works on any public website, including WordPress. Reviews technical SEO, on-page elements, content and UX, and ranks the fixes. $29.95 one-time.
Audit your WordPress siteResults
What you can measure
Realistic signals to track. Results depend on your market and starting point.
- Indexed pages and coverage issues in Search Console
- Mobile Core Web Vitals in Search Console
- Fewer duplicate titles and broken links
How it works
Practical next steps
- STEP 1
Check Settings > Reading and your SEO plugin's indexing settings
- STEP 2
Run the SEO Audit on your site
- STEP 3
Remove unused plugins and fix high-priority issues
- STEP 4
Resubmit your sitemap and monitor Search Console
Checklist
WordPress SEO checklist
- Settings → Reading: "Discourage search engines" is unticked on the live site
- Only one SEO plugin is active, so you don't get duplicate titles or sitemaps
- Permalinks use readable post names rather than ?p=123
- Tag, author and date archives that add no value are set to noindex
- Images are compressed and the theme isn't loading unused page-builder assets
- Plugins and themes are updated, and unused ones are removed
Worked example
Example: thin tag pages crowding out real content
A WordPress blog with 80 posts has more than 300 tag archive pages, each listing one or two posts. Search Console shows many as "Crawled – currently not indexed", while some real posts are slow to be indexed.
The owner sets tag archives to noindex in their SEO plugin, removes tags used only once, and makes sure category pages have a short introduction. The sitemap now lists the pages that matter.
Troubleshooting
If something isn't working
Two different titles show in the page source
Your theme and plugin are both adding titles, or two SEO plugins are active. Keep one source.
Site was indexed, then disappeared
Check the "Discourage search engines" setting and any maintenance or security plugin that blocks crawlers.
Slow pages after installing a builder
Test with plugins disabled one by one. Heavy sliders and builders are common causes.
Guides
More WordPress SEO articles
Technical SEO checklist for small business websites
A plain-language technical SEO checklist for small business websites: crawling, indexing, site structure, speed, mobile, metadata and structured data.
7 min readWhy Google is not indexing your website pages
Diagnose why pages aren't indexed using Search Console's Pages report: noindex, canonicals, robots.txt, duplicate content, quality and discovery issues.
6 min readCanonical tags explained for beginners
What canonical tags are, when you need them, how Google treats them, and how to avoid the canonical mistakes that quietly keep pages out of search.
FAQs
Common questions
Find out what's holding your WordPress site back
A prioritized fix list for your site.