This WordPress SEO checklist covers 30 checks in six groups, from the settings screens most people never revisit to the templates and plugins that quietly shape every page. Each item has a clear pass or fail.
By Kristijan GjorgjioskiIndependent SEO consultantPublished 18 October 2026 · 9 min read
WordPress gets a lot right out of the box. It also creates pages you never planned, and its defaults suit a generic blog rather than your business.
Most WordPress sites I audit fail the same handful of checks. This list puts them in one place, grouped so you can hand sections to whoever owns them.
You don't need to do all 30 checks in one sitting. Start where your symptoms point:
Each check has a pass state you can confirm in a few minutes. Copy the item numbers into a spreadsheet with Status, Owner and Notes columns and you have a working audit sheet.
These screens are set once and forgotten. Mistakes here repeat across every URL on the site.
Go to Settings → Reading and look for Search engine visibility.
If "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" is ticked on your live site, fix it now. It's often left on after a launch from staging.
Pass: box unticked on production.
Under Settings → General, the WordPress Address and Site Address should match your chosen version: https, with or without www.
Then test the other three versions in a browser. Each should redirect permanently to the one you picked.
Pass: every variant lands on a single https address in one hop.
Check Settings → Permalinks. "Plain" gives you URLs like ?p=123. "Post name" gives you /your-post-title/.
On a new site, pick a readable structure before publishing. On an established site, don't change it without a full redirect map, because every URL moves.
Pass: descriptive URLs, and no structure change planned without redirects.
Under Settings → Discussion, "Break comments into pages" creates extra URLs for each page of comments.
Most business sites don't need them.
Pass: option off, or the extra comment pages kept out of the index.
Search Google for your staging subdomain. If it shows results, you have duplicate copies of your site indexed.
Protect staging with a password. A noindex alone isn't enough if someone switches it off by accident.
Pass: no staging URLs in Google, staging behind a login.
An SEO plugin writes your titles, robots tags, canonicals, sitemap and schema. Its defaults are a starting point, not a decision.
Two SEO plugins, or an SEO plugin plus a theme with its own SEO settings, often output two sets of titles, canonicals or schema.
View the page source of a post and search for og:title and canonical. Each should appear once.
Pass: one plugin active, one set of meta tags per page.
Not sure which plugin to pick? I compare the two most common in Yoast vs Rank Math.
Posts, pages, products, categories and custom post types each need a title pattern that reads well in results.
Then write custom titles for your most important pages. Templates are a fallback, not a strategy. My guide to writing title tags covers the format.
Pass: no page with a default "Page title - Site name" pattern where a better title is obvious.
Go through your plugin's content type and taxonomy settings one by one. For each, ask: would a searcher want to land here?
Services, posts and products usually yes. Tags, format archives and internal post types usually no.
Pass: a written decision for every type, and plugin settings that match it.
WordPress core has produced a basic sitemap since version 5.5, and most SEO plugins replace it with their own. Open the one you use.
It should list only URLs you want indexed: no noindexed archives, no redirected URLs, no attachment pages.
Pass: sitemap submitted in Search Console, and every URL in it returns 200 and is indexable.
Fill in your business name, logo and social profiles in the plugin's schema settings. Turn on breadcrumbs if your theme displays them.
Test a few pages in Google's Rich Results Test. For anything the plugin can't output, the schema markup generator helps.
Pass: valid schema with no errors on your key templates.
This is where WordPress sites leak thin pages into the index. Every tag, author and month gets its own listing page.
Open Posts → Tags and sort by count. Tags used once or twice create near-empty pages that compete with your real content.
Merge overlapping tags, delete one-off tags, and redirect any that earned links or traffic. The same keep, merge or remove logic from my content pruning guide applies here.
Pass: no tag page with fewer than a handful of posts left indexable.
If category pages are indexed, they need more than a list of post titles. Add a short introduction and a clear heading.
Pass: every indexed category has unique intro copy and a proper H1.
If one person writes everything, the author archive is a duplicate of the blog page.
Noindex it, or disable it and redirect to the About page.
Pass: author archives either useful (multi-author) or out of the index.
Monthly archives like /2024/03/ rarely match any search, and they spread Google's attention across pages that add nothing. Noindex or disable them.
Pass: date archive URLs not indexed.
Each uploaded image can have its own page, often with nothing but the image on it. Make sure attachment URLs redirect to the file or the parent post.
Pass: an attachment URL redirects instead of loading a thin page.
URLs with ?s= are your site's search results. They shouldn't be indexed.
Search Google for site:yourdomain.com inurl:?s= to check.
Pass: no search result pages in Google.
Your theme and page builder decide what HTML Google actually receives. Speed problems usually start here too.
Open one page of each template type and inspect the headings. Themes often use H1s for logos or H2s for sidebar widgets.
Pass: one H1 per page, matching the page topic, with headings in logical order.
Sliders, tabs and accordions sometimes load text with JavaScript after the page renders. View source, not the browser display, and search for a sentence from the copy.
Pass: the important text appears in the page source or in URL Inspection's rendered HTML.
Switching page builders often leaves shortcodes like [vc_row] printed as plain text on old pages.
Search your content for square brackets on older posts.
Pass: no raw shortcodes visible on any page.
Use PageSpeed Insights or the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console. Test the homepage, a post, a service page and a product page separately. Fixes that go beyond settings usually need a technical SEO pass on the templates themselves.
Pass: each template group passes, or has a named fix with an owner.
List each active plugin and what it adds to the front end. Sliders, social feeds, chat widgets and form plugins often load scripts site-wide even when used on one page.
Pass: every front-end plugin justifies its cost, or loads only where it's used.
Full-size camera or design exports slow every page they appear on. Compress them, serve modern formats where your setup supports them, and set dimensions.
Don't lazy-load the main image at the top of the page. It delays the element visitors see first.
Pass: no image over a sensible file size, hero image not lazy-loaded.
Open Tools → Site Health. It flags outdated PHP, missing modules and failed background tasks.
Pass: no critical issues in Site Health.
Settings get you indexed. Content and links get you ranked.
Two posts targeting the same query split signals between them. List your key pages with their main keyword and look for duplicates, as explained in my guide to avoiding keyword cannibalisation.
Pass: no two indexable URLs chasing the same primary query.
Templates fill in descriptions automatically, often badly. Write them by hand for your top pages and preview them with the SERP snippet preview tool.
Pass: custom descriptions on every page that earns or should earn traffic.
New content starts with no internal links unless you add them. After publishing, link to it from two or three relevant older posts. A simple internal linking strategy makes this a habit.
Pass: no important page with zero internal links pointing to it.
Describe images that carry information, such as diagrams, product photos and screenshots. Decorative images can stay empty.
Pass: every informative image has descriptive alt text.
WordPress sites drift. Plugins update, editors add tags, pages get deleted. These checks keep the site clean.
Every time a page is deleted or its slug changes, add a 301 to the closest relevant page. Use your SEO plugin's redirect feature or a dedicated plugin.
Pass: no internal links or backlinks pointing at 404s.
Check the Page indexing report for new exclusions and the Performance report for drops. A sudden spike in "Excluded by noindex tag" after a plugin update is a warning sign.
Pass: no unexplained jump in excluded pages.
Theme and builder updates can drop titles, schema or body copy without warning. Spot-check your key templates after each major update.
Pass: titles, headings, schema and copy unchanged after the update.
Not every fail is urgent. Sort them like this:
| Priority | What it covers | Example checks |
|---|---|---|
| Fix today | Anything blocking indexing site-wide | 1, 2, 5 |
| Fix this month | Thin or duplicate pages in the index | 8, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16 |
| Plan it | Templates, speed and plugins | 17, 18, 20, 21 |
| Ongoing | Content, links and upkeep | 24 to 30 |
Fixes that need a developer, such as template changes, are worth batching into one ticket list. Settings changes you can usually make yourself in an afternoon.
The broader checks that apply to any CMS live in my technical SEO checklist and on-page SEO checklist.
Open Settings → Reading on your live site right now. Then check that only one SEO plugin is writing your tags.
After that, pick the group with the most fails and fix the single biggest item first. Usually that's archives.
If you run WooCommerce, the store side has its own problems, covered in my WooCommerce SEO guide.
And if you'd rather have someone go through the whole list with you, my WordPress SEO service starts with exactly this audit. You can also see how I handle themes, plugins and archive clean-up on WordPress before deciding anything.
For most sites, yes. WordPress core handles permalinks and a basic sitemap, but it does not give you per-page titles and descriptions, index controls for archives, or structured data settings. An SEO plugin adds those controls. Use one plugin only, and configure it rather than relying on its defaults.
Usually not. Most sites have many tags used on only one or two posts, which creates thin listing pages that compete with real content. Keep tag pages indexed only if each one gathers enough posts to be a useful page on its own, with an introduction that explains the topic.
Run the full WordPress SEO checklist once when you launch or take over a site, then after any theme change, page builder switch or migration. The maintenance checks, such as Search Console reviews and redirect clean-up, are worth doing monthly because plugins and editors change things over time.
Yes. The theme controls heading structure, how much code each page loads, whether content sits in the HTML or arrives later through JavaScript, and sometimes adds its own meta tags. Two sites with identical content can perform differently because of the templates around that content.
About the author
Kristijan Gjorgjioski
Independent SEO consultant · 6+ years in SEO · 60+ client websites worked on
I'm an independent SEO consultant with 6+ years in SEO. I run audits, migrations and content programmes for businesses in Europe, the UK and the USA, and I build the automation behind my own research.
Book a free 30-minute call. I look at your site first and tell you plainly what I would fix, and in what order.