WordPress technical SEO checklist for 2026

This WordPress technical SEO checklist is the one I actually work through when I take over a site. It is not exhaustive, and it is not meant to be. It covers the issues I find again and again on WordPress, in roughly the order that fixing them pays off. If you only have an afternoon, do the crawl and indexation sections first.

For context: I run the daily SEO routine on the Crypto Accountants WordPress site, alongside a forum, an academy and an AI assistant, and I have shipped more than 200 WordPress sites since 2020. The same handful of problems show up on almost all of them.

Can Google actually crawl the pages that matter?

Before anything else, confirm that nothing is blocking access.

• Settings, Reading. Check that "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" is unticked. I have seen live sites launched with it still on from staging. It happens more than anyone admits.
• robots.txt. Visit /robots.txt directly. It should be short. Blocking /wp-admin/ (with an allow for admin-ajax.php) is fine. Blocking /wp-content/ or /wp-includes/ is not, because Google needs CSS and JavaScript to render the page.
• Server responses. Crawl the site with a desktop crawler and look for 5xx errors, redirect chains and pages that return 200 but show an error message. Security plugins and firewalls sometimes block Googlebot by mistake, so check the server logs if crawl stats look odd.
• Orphan pages. Any page not linked from anywhere else will be crawled rarely, if at all. Compare your sitemap against your crawl to find them.

Which pages should be indexed?

This is where most WordPress sites leak. WordPress generates a lot of URLs you never asked for. Go through each type and make a decision:

• Tag archives: noindex unless each tag has a genuine, curated purpose. Usually they do not.
• Attachment pages: redirect to the parent post or the file. Both Yoast and Rank Math have a setting for this.
• Author archives: noindex on single-author sites, since they duplicate the blog index.
• Date archives: noindex or disable.
• Paginated archives: leave them indexable with self-referencing canonicals. Do not canonical page 2 to page 1.
• Search results and filter URLs: noindex. WooCommerce layered navigation and filter plugins can create thousands of near-duplicate URLs.
• Thin service or location pages: improve them, merge them or remove them. Do not let them sit there.

Then check the XML sitemap. It should contain only canonical, indexable, 200-status URLs. If your sitemap lists URLs that are noindexed or redirected, you are sending Google mixed signals.

Canonicals and duplicates

Every indexable page should have a self-referencing canonical. Check that HTTP redirects to HTTPS, that www and non-www resolve to one version, and that trailing slashes are consistent. Query strings from UTM tags and session parameters should not create indexable duplicates.

How do I get Core Web Vitals into the good range on WordPress?

Use Search Console's Core Web Vitals report first, because it shows field data from real users, grouped by similar URLs. Lab tools like PageSpeed Insights are useful for diagnosis, but the field data is what Google uses.

On WordPress, the causes are predictable:

1. Largest Contentful Paint. Usually the hero image. Serve it in a modern format at the right dimensions, do not lazy-load it, and consider adding fetchpriority="high". Slow hosting and no page caching also show up here.
2. Interaction to Next Paint. Usually too much JavaScript on the main thread. Sliders, animation libraries, chat widgets and stacked tracking tags are the usual suspects. Delay non-essential scripts until user interaction.
3. Cumulative Layout Shift. Images without width and height, web fonts swapping late, cookie banners pushing content down, and ads or embeds without reserved space.

Page builders add weight, but they are not automatically the problem. A carefully built Elementor page can pass. A theme loading five icon libraries and three sliders on every page will not. If you want the longer version of that argument, I wrote about when Elementor makes sense and when a custom theme is better.

Fix one template at a time: home, then service or product template, then blog post. Re-test on a throttled mobile connection, not your office broadband.

What schema should a WordPress site have?

Schema should describe what is visibly on the page. That is the whole rule. Marking up reviews nobody wrote or FAQs that are not on the page is how sites end up with manual actions.

A sensible baseline:

• Organization or LocalBusiness on the home page, with consistent name, logo, contact details and sameAs links to your real profiles.
• WebSite with a search action if you have site search.
• BreadcrumbList on everything below the home page.
• Article or BlogPosting on posts, with a real author and dates.
• Product on WooCommerce product pages, with price and availability that match what is shown.
• FAQPage where the page genuinely has a question and answer section.

On the Singapore property landing pages I build for Jome Journey, FAQPage schema is generated from the same content block a visitor sees, so the two can never drift apart. That is the pattern I recommend everywhere. Validate with the Rich Results Test and the Schema Markup Validator after any template change.

How should internal linking work?

Internal links tell Google which pages matter and how they relate. Most sites under-link their most important pages and over-link their footer.

• Link from high-traffic posts to the service or product pages they support, using descriptive anchor text.
• Keep important pages within three clicks of the home page.
• Group content into clusters: one main page per topic, with supporting posts linking up to it and across to each other.
• Fix internal links that point to redirected URLs. Update them to the final destination.
• Use breadcrumbs. They help users and create a clean link hierarchy for free.

What Yoast or Rank Math settings matter?

Both plugins are capable. The defaults are not always right for your site, though. Settings I check every time:

• Search appearance per content type. Set which post types and taxonomies are indexable, matching the decisions you made above.
• Attachment URLs redirected to the parent or the file.
• Title templates that put the primary keyword first and the brand last, without duplicated separators.
• XML sitemap enabled, with excluded types matching your noindex choices.
• Breadcrumbs enabled and output in the theme.
• Organisation or person details filled in for the knowledge graph schema.
• Schema defaults per post type, so posts become Article and pages do not become something random.

Never run two SEO plugins at once. Duplicate canonicals and conflicting meta robots tags are a common cause of pages dropping out of the index.

What does a weekly Search Console routine look like?

This is the part people skip, and it is the part that protects everything above. My routine takes about fifteen minutes:

1. Pages report. Look for new "Excluded by noindex", "Not found (404)" and "Crawled, currently not indexed" entries. Investigate anything that jumped.
2. Sitemaps. Confirm the last read date is recent and there are no errors.
3. Core Web Vitals. Check whether any URL group has moved from good to needs improvement.
4. Performance. Compare the last 28 days with the previous period. Sort queries by clicks lost. A sudden drop on one page usually has a technical cause.
5. Manual actions and security issues. Should always be empty.
6. URL inspection on any page you changed that week, then request indexing.

Keep a simple changelog of what you changed and when. When rankings move, you will want to know whether it was you or Google.

Where does AI search fit in?

Everything above also helps with AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity, because those systems still depend on pages they can crawl, parse and trust. There are a few extra steps on top, which I cover in how to get cited by ChatGPT and AI Overviews. You can also see how I apply this routine across four connected properties in the Crypto Accountants web platform case study.

Need a hand?

If you would rather someone else worked through this list on your site, I offer technical SEO audits and fixes for WordPress, from indexation clean-ups to Core Web Vitals work on a single template. Get in touch and tell me what you are seeing in Search Console.

Hamza Naqvi

Software engineer in Lahore. 200+ websites shipped since 2020, from WordPress and Shopify builds to multi-tenant SaaS and AI assistants. More about me.