How to improve SEO on a WordPress website or blog

Is WordPress good for SEO?

Yes. Search engines do not rank a site higher or lower because it runs on WordPress. What they see is the HTML each page sends, how fast it arrives and how the pages link to each other, and WordPress handles the basics of all three well. Out of the box it gives you:

• Crawlable HTML. Posts and pages are rendered on the server, so the text is in the source Google downloads, with no JavaScript needed to see it.
• A title tag per page. Themes that declare title-tag support let WordPress write the <title> from the post title and site name.
• An XML sitemap. Since version 5.5, core publishes one at /wp-sitemap.xml and lists it in the virtual robots.txt.
• Canonical tags on single posts and pages, and native lazy loading for images further down the page.

What WordPress does not do is decide your page titles and descriptions for searchers, stop low-value archive pages from being indexed, or keep a heavy theme and twenty plugins fast. Those are the parts you fix, and they are the same whether you run a five-page business site or a blog with a thousand posts.

The WordPress settings that hold sites back

Most WordPress SEO problems come from a short list of defaults and leftovers. Check these first, because they affect every page at once.

WordPress 6.4 and later turn attachment pages off on new installs, but sites that were set up earlier usually still have them. If you moved the site from a staging copy, check the visibility setting before anything else: it is the single most common reason a new WordPress site gets no search traffic at all.

How to check your WordPress SEO setup

You can confirm most of the basics without logging in. Start by fetching a post with curl and reading what Google would receive:

curl -s https://example.com/sample-post/ | grep -iE '<title>|name="robots"|rel="canonical"|name="description"'

You want one title, one canonical pointing at the same address, a description, and either no robots tag or one that says index. A line containing noindex on a page you want in Google is the first thing to fix. Then check the robots file and the sitemap:

curl -s https://example.com/robots.txt
curl -sI https://example.com/wp-sitemap.xml
curl -sI https://example.com/sitemap_index.xml

If your host gives you a shell, WP-CLI shows the settings directly:

wp option get blog_public          # 1 means visible to search engines, 0 means hidden
wp option get permalink_structure  # empty means plain permalinks
wp plugin list --status=active     # look for two SEO plugins at once

Finally, paste a key address into URL Inspection in Google Search Console. It tells you whether the page is indexed, which canonical Google chose, and whether the live page can be indexed now. Running a crawl of the whole site with our WordPress site audit guide alongside it shows the same issues across every page rather than one at a time.

Titles, descriptions, headings and content

Once Google can crawl the site, the biggest gains come from the words on each page. For every important post and page:

• Write a unique title of roughly 50 to 60 characters that starts with what a searcher would type, for example Sourdough Starter Guide: Feed, Store and Revive | Example Bakery. See how to fix title tags.
• Write a meta description of about 150 to 160 characters that says what the page gives the reader. Google rewrites some of them, but a good one is shown more often. The WordPress meta tags guide covers where these fields live.
• Use one H1, which in most themes is the post title, and H2 and H3 headings for the sections below it. Do not use headings just to make text bigger.
• Answer the question in the first paragraph, then add the detail: steps, examples, prices, photos you took yourself. Pages that only repeat what ranks already rarely move.
• Give images descriptive file names and alt text before you upload them, and resize them to the width the theme actually displays.

Blogs: categories, tags and archives

For a blog, keep a small number of categories that act as topic hubs, write a short introduction at the top of each category page, and use tags sparingly. A tag used on one post creates a listing page with one item on it. Either merge rarely used tags or set tag archives to noindex in your SEO plugin. Date and author archives on a single-author blog are duplicates of the main blog listing and can be set to noindex or switched off.

Internal links, sitemaps and speed

Internal links tell Google which pages matter and help it find new posts quickly. Link from older, well-visited posts to newer ones on the same subject, use descriptive anchor text rather than click here, and make sure every post is linked from at least one category page or another post. The blog internal linking guide shows a simple hub-and-spoke pattern.

Sitemaps

Use one sitemap, not two. If you install an SEO plugin, it normally switches off the core /wp-sitemap.xml and publishes its own index, often at /sitemap_index.xml. Submit whichever one is live in Search Console under Sitemaps, and remove any old sitemap addresses that now return errors. See robots.txt and sitemaps in WordPress.

Speed

Speed is a smaller ranking signal than relevance, but a slow mobile page loses visitors before they read anything. The usual WordPress fixes, in order of effect:

1. Turn on full-page caching, through your host or a caching plugin, so pages are not built from scratch on every visit.
2. Serve images in WebP or AVIF at sensible widths, and do not lazy-load the main image at the top of the page.
3. Remove plugins you no longer use, and replace sliders and heavy page builder sections on key templates.
4. Use a current PHP version supported by your host and your plugins.

The WordPress page speed guide and Core Web Vitals in WordPress go further.

A worked example: Example Bakery's blog

Example Bakery moved its site from a staging subdomain to example.com and, after three months, had eleven pages indexed and almost no search visits. The checks above found four problems:

1. wp option get blog_public returned 0: the visibility box had been carried over from staging. Every page carried noindex, nofollow.
2. Permalinks were set to plain, so posts lived at /?p=482.
3. The site had 340 tag archives for 90 posts, most with a single post on them.
4. The homepage used a slider with five full-size images, and mobile LCP was over 5 seconds.

The fix took an afternoon. Unticking the visibility box removed the noindex. Switching to the Post name structure changed the addresses to /sourdough-starter-guide/, and WordPress itself redirects old ?p= links to the new address, so nothing broke. Tag archives were set to noindex and trimmed to twelve useful tags, the slider was replaced with one compressed hero image, and the new sitemap was submitted. Within six weeks Search Console showed 96 indexed pages and the first non-brand search clicks.

The fix, step by step

Edge cases worth knowing

• Changing permalinks on an established site. Moving from plain to Post name is handled well by WordPress, but changing from one pretty structure to another, such as removing /blog/%postname%/, needs 301 redirects for every old address. Plan them first with the WordPress redirects guide.
• Two SEO plugins active. You can end up with two titles, two descriptions and two sets of structured data. Keep one plugin and deactivate the other after importing its data.
• Page builders hiding the H1. Some builder layouts drop the post title and use a styled text block instead. Check the rendered HTML for exactly one <h1>.
• Caching serving an old noindex. After changing the visibility setting, clear the page cache and any CDN cache, or Google may keep seeing the old tag.
• Hosted WordPress.com plans. Some plans do not allow plugins or server access. The same principles apply, but you use the built-in settings rather than WP-CLI.

Keeping WordPress SEO in good shape

WordPress sites drift. A plugin update changes a default, a designer adds a new template, or a staging copy is pushed live with the visibility box ticked. A short routine catches it:

1. After every deployment or migration, run the curl check above on the homepage and one post, and confirm there is no noindex.
2. Once a month, open the Pages report in Search Console and read the reasons for pages that are not indexed, such as excluded by noindex tag.
3. Before adding a plugin, ask what it adds to every page's HTML and whether it duplicates something you already have.
4. Give every new post at least two internal links in and one out, and add it to its category page.

Crawling the site every few months finds the issues a single page check misses, such as broken links, duplicate titles and pages that slipped out of the sitemap.