WordPress SEO: the settings to check before you write a word

Setting 1: the box that hides your site

Under Settings > Reading, the “Search engine visibility” section has a single box: “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”. It is often ticked while the site is being built, then forgotten at launch. While it stays ticked, WordPress (since version 5.3) adds a robots meta tag set to “noindex,nofollow” to the code of every page.

The setting does not lock the site: it asks search engines not to index it. A site that does not show up on Google at all, even when you type its name, should have this box checked first.

1. 1
   Open Settings > Reading in the dashboard.
2. 2
   Untick the visibility box, then click “Save Changes”.
3. 3
   View the source of the home page (right-click, “View page source”) and search for “noindex”: it must no longer appear on the pages you want found.
4. 4
   In Search Console, request indexing of the home page with the URL Inspection tool.

Setting 2: readable permalinks

Permalinks are the addresses of your pages and posts, set under Settings > Permalinks. The “Plain” structure gives addresses like ?p=123, which tell the visitor nothing; the “Post name” structure gives /sample-post, the shortest and clearest choice for a business website.

Choose the structure at launch. On a site that already has indexed pages, changing the structure changes every address at once: each old address must then point to the new one with a permanent (301) redirect, which Google treats as a strong signal that the new address should replace the old one in its results.

• Service pages: a short address that names the service, for example /bathroom-renovation/.
• No date in the address of a service page: it does not age.
• After a structure change, test several old addresses: each must land on the right page, not on an error.

Setting 3: the sitemap WordPress already builds

Since version 5.5, WordPress publishes a sitemap index on its own at /wp-sitemap.xml: it lists pages, posts, categories, author archives and the home page, and the robots.txt file WordPress serves points to it. Google says the same: with a CMS such as WordPress, it is likely that a sitemap has already been made available to search engines.

Two traps. If the visibility box from setting 1 is ticked, WordPress disables its sitemaps. And if you install an SEO plugin that produces its own sitemap, submit the address that actually responds: open it in your browser before you send it.

1. 1
   Open yoursite.co.uk/wp-sitemap.xml (or your plugin’s sitemap) and check it lists your service pages.
2. 2
   Submit it in Search Console, Sitemaps report, then in Bing Webmaster Tools.
3. 3
   Check the dates: Google uses a sitemap’s last modified date only if it is consistently and verifiably accurate.

Setting 4: a title and a description for every page

Google asks for a title in the <title> element of every page, descriptive and concise, and advises against vague titles such as “Home”. There is no length limit, but the title link is truncated in results as needed. On WordPress, the title shown in Google depends on your theme and, most often, on an SEO plugin that also adds a meta description field.

This is the step most often missed: in our study, 41% of small business sites lack a title of 25 to 65 characters and 50% lack a meta description of 70 to 165 characters. Each service page needs its own title, not the site name repeated everywhere.

1. 1
   Home page: your trade and your town, then the business name. Not “Home”.
2. 2
   One page per service, with the main search for that service in its title.
3. 3
   Meta description: what you do, for whom and what sets you apart, in one or two sentences.
4. 4
   One H1 per page that says what the page offers: 45% of the sites in our study do not have one on the home page.

Do you need an SEO plugin?

WordPress does not require one. The common SEO plugins (Yoast SEO, Rank Math, All in One SEO, SEOPress, among others) are free in the official WordPress.org plugin directory, with paid options on the side. They mainly add handy fields: a title and meta description per page, sitemap settings, sharing tags and structured data.

One at a time: two SEO plugins active together can output two titles, two descriptions or two sitemaps. And a plugin does not do the real work: it gives you the box to fill in, not the text that goes in it.

• Before installing: check no other SEO plugin is active.
• After installing: review the title and description of the home page and service pages, they do not fill themselves in.
• Check a page’s source: one <title>, one meta description, one canonical tag.

Setting 5: describe the business in structured data

LocalBusiness structured data gives Google your name, address, phone number and opening hours in a standard format. For a CMS such as WordPress, Google says it itself: “Using a CMS? It may be easier to use a plugin that’s integrated into your CMS.”

In our study, 55% of small business sites do not describe the business in structured data. Once the markup is in place, validate it with Google’s Rich Results Test and check that the details match your Google Business Profile.

Images, speed and theme

In the WordPress Media Library, every image has an “Alternative text” field. Google describes alt text as a short but descriptive piece of text that explains the relationship between the image and your content, and helps search engines understand the image. 21% of the sites in our study leave more than one image in five without it.

Speed depends mostly on the theme, the plugins and the weight of the images. Google rates an LCP as good under 2.5 s, an INP under 200 ms and a CLS under 0.1. Deactivate and then delete plugins you no longer use, compress images before uploading them and test the home page on a phone.